Take a look at the following patches, they are taken from two separate photographs after enlarging them 10 times. Do they look like someone’s skin to you? Do you see any skin texture, which at this magnification should look like Lunar surface.

The practice of selecting the model’s skin and applying a heavy dose of Gaussian Blur may give the illusion of an “angelic face.” But even angel skin has texture! Look at some paintings by Da Vinci, Caravaggio, and others. I know, they are paintings and not modern.

Forget the ancient, let’s take a look at a similar section of facial skin from a sample photo edited by David Cuerdon, one of the instructors on KelbyTraining.com and a professional portrait retoucher. Compare this fragment to those above and decide which one looks beautiful, sensual, touchable, plausible, and convincing.

So, where does this “trend” come from? Before the advent of digital photography photographers used other tools to enhance the look of the models, celebrities they photographed. These tools ranged from careful lighting, to nylon women’s hosiery stretched over the lens. Those who could afford used dedicated soft focus lenses that provided a gauzy look to the photograph diminishing major details but never totally eliminating. Of course, there were filters used in front of normal lenses that provided similar results.

After the advent of digital photography things got a bit out of hand. Those with some skills in editing software like Photoshop started using layers that combined a slightly blurred layer with a normal photograph to imitate the look of the soft focus lenses or filters. When used properly, this method can still provide compelling results but one must have the vision and the patience to learn and apply the tools. Or, one can buy a “filter” plugin for Photoshop and let it decide what to do. One such filter was made by Kodak and at the request of a friend I tested it and got horrified by the results. The filter indiscriminately selects the skin and blurs it to the nth degree, creating what I started calling electroluminescent plasma skin. With the blessing of competition judges, the use of this kind of filters and home-brew variations gradually increased to the point that some now consider it “normal”. Friends, there is nothing normal about it at all. It is not only not normal, it is not photographic. I have no problem with extensive editing of photographs, so my position is not one of a purist. However, the misuse or even abuse of the tool, no matter how many practice it does not make it the new normal. Calling this a new trend ignores the qualities of photographs and remains indifferent to below par use of the tools.

To illustrate what the origins of this misunderstood and often misused “skin softening” I borrowed a Canon 135mm f/2.8 Soft Focus lens from Canon and photographed a person and a bunch of flowers. Canon 135mm Soft Focus lens has settings that provide no softening, and level 1 and level 2 softening. Additionally, the softness is most pronounced at the wide open f-stop and it progressively diminishes as the diaphragm is closed. I photographed the person (my patient wife) and the flowers (Coreopsis in our front yard) at the widest f-stop and in the same sequence, no softening, level 1, and level 2. Then I cropped an enlarged portion of each image to provide even more detail. There is no amount of sharpening added to any of the photographs and they are as they came from the camera except for reducing the image size for Web use. Take a look at these photographs and continue reading below. I think the amount of softening is a bit excessive but I wanted to show the maximum effect to compare against the digital counterpart of it. Even then, the maximum softness does not provide results similar to the blurred skin.

Now, several things should be easy to observe:

1. None of the photographs using any of the settings is “blurred”, I would probably characterize the result as “veiled”
2. The skin retains the texture, wrinkles, and other major blemishes
3. The result does not even remotely resemble Gaussian Blur which parametrically averages pixels to smooth the differences and results in plastic look
4. Whereas the desired result is “de-emphasized differences”
5. Soft focus lens does not discriminate eyes, they get veiled too
6. Similar results can be obtained in Photoshop with a little more care

My principle reason for this series of writings is not to interfere with anyone’s artistic freedom. However, not mentioning the misuse of tools and the sacrificed photographic principles would have bothered me more than the flak I may get in response to my posts. After I wrote the earlier post about PSA being an enabler in this practice I realized I had not provided sufficient explanation why I considered these ill-conceived practices. So, this installment should provide enough historical, technical, and aesthetic material to explain my position and hope that the portrait and model photographers take what I have presented to heart and reconsider their practices.

In the hope of helping the transformation, I am making my presentation notes from NECCC 2010 on this subject freely available. Download the document, share it, use it, think about it, and hopefully adopt the working principles in your photography. Below are the before and after results of editing that I demonstrated at NECCC 2010, and they are a little more than I would have done had it not been for the demonstration of different tools.

Good photography does not need gimmicks.

The previous installment of this post, Lightroom Adjustments: Exposure vs Brightness was featured on the facebook Lightroom page and brought a very large number of visitors to this modest site. Over 5,000 visits and more than 8,000 page views were exceptional numbers for Kept Light. Also, comments and questions both on this site and on facebook nudged me to continue the investigation and focus on color shift during the exposure and brightness adjustments.

I made a color and gray scale ramp in Photoshop with carefully applied colors and grays. The purpose was to see if the saturation or the hue would change differently under different adjustments. The sample was imported into Lightroom and I took careful measurements of each patch in Lightroom. The top row of numbers in each cell represent Photoshop RGB values in which each color changes from 0 to 255. The second row of numbers are the Lightroom measurements where each channel has percentage values that range from 0 to 100. The first thing that is very easy to observe is that Lightroom color model is a good deal different from the Photoshop RGB model. In the Photoshop color formation there is a clearly visible patterns, like 0-0-255 and 0-255-0 which are linear relationships. Increasing the red from 127 to 255 will max that channel and double the Red value. The same behavior will be observed on the green or the blue channels as well. In Lightroom color model this kind of pattern is simply not there; different hues are formed with a different formula as you can see in the percentage numbers. The only place where the pattern based behavior is visible is on the gray scale patches.

The second thing that is worth observing right away is that the luminosity values for each color and each patch are interpreted differently in Photoshop and Lightroom, further supporting the idea that the color models are substantially different. Take a look at the two gray scale versions of the target done in Photoshop and in Lightroom by reducing the saturation to zero. You will notice that the gray values coming from Photoshop produce the same tonal values for patches where the amount of R, G and B are similar like 0-0-255 and 255-0-0 producing identical gray tones. The situation is a good deal different in Lightroom. When desaturated, the color patches show different levels of brightness that will probably explain some of the later observations. In other words, “greens” are “brighter” than “reds” which are “brighter” than “blues”.

I proceeded to apply one adjustment at a time, exposure -2, -1, +1, +2 and brightness -100, -50, +50,  +100 and recorded the Lightroom values in each square on the test chart. These numbers along with the original readings were entered into an Excel spread sheet. Since I wanted to see the “change” in the value of each square I calculated the difference between the adjusted values and the original values to produce the bar charts you will see below. What is not easy to see in the bar charts will be much easier to see when you look at the test image with each adjustment applied.

Here are the Excel produced charts which are kept to the same axis scaling so as to avoid perceptual distortion:

Now take a look at the color patch sample with each of the adjustments:

The last set of images are quite informative, albeit in a subjective way. It is easy to see that “darkening” an image using exposure or brightness is a forgiving adjustment regardless of the adjustment tool used. However, when “brightening” the image, exposure adjustment creates serious hue shift in greens and blues. This is particularly easy to see in the fourth image, Exposure + 2. On the other hand, the brightness adjustment retains the hues fairly faithful to the original values and displays a more “expected” result. None of the brightness adjustments, under or over exposing the image causes any subjectively visible hue shift in any of the patches.

Not knowing the actual color model used in Lightroom it is difficult, even improper to make a statement about the cause of this behavior. However, based on my observations of the channel value changes as one of these sliders are moved I can say this:

The exposure adjustment moves the values in the channels reasonably close steps. Consequently, it quickly runs out of room on a channel where the starting value is high to begin with. After reaching 100% on that channel, Lightroom continues to increment the other channels to provide the exposure increase. On the other hand, the brightness slider is far more judicious in its steps and somehow manages not to run out of head room in any of the channels as the level of brightness is increased. Consequently, it avoids the hue shift that quickly emerges in the exposure adjustments. The reason why neither adjustment causing hue shifts in “darkening” the image must have to do with the ample head room in each channel for decreasing values.

The empirical observations and visual cues and clues indicate that if a photograph needs serious upward adjustment of the “darkness” the brightness slider may be a better starting point. (I used “darkness” to avoid referring to either of the adjustment slider directly.) For modest adjustments, or to darken the image either slider seems to produce similar results. I would liken the brightness slider to the behavior of a curves adjustment layer in Photoshop after changing its blend mode to “Luminosity.” In fact, if an image needs that much adjustment in the upward direction making that adjustment in Photoshop may offer additional flexibilities. In addition to changing the blend mode of the curves to luminosity I can also use the “blend if” sliders to further adjust how each channel may be affected by adjustment or use layer masking and the like.

It would be awfully good of someone who knows the inner workings of Lightroom to provide better explanations of these adjustments. My curiosity brought me up to this point. I hope that this installment provides a little better understanding of the color shift behavior others seem to allude but not explain. Here at least you have visual clues as to the impact of these adjustments on color shift and some measurement results charted.

An advertising watchdog group in Britain has banned two overly retouched L’Oreal ads featuring the actress and model, claiming that the digitally altered images are misleading, the Daily Mail reported.

The Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K. is demanding that the company pull a two-page magazine ad Roberts did for Lancome, one of L’Oreal’s makeup brands, claiming that the actress’ flawless skin is too good to be true.

I have been writing about this, even made presentations (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) to photographers last year, that this kind of “retouching” is total nonsense and in a recent post “On Photography” I even chided PSA for not promoting better photography. This kind of action is necessary, not only for photographic reasons but more importantly for personal values for young women and men. Now that regulatory forces stepped it, I sure hope that the photographers step up to the plate and do the right thing. Judges, do not reward this kind of photography for it is neither good photography nor good values. Photographers, do not resort to “cheap” techniques and devalue your work. Honest work eventually shines.

Read the full story in NY Daily News

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