Fleshbout recently drew my attention to Annie Stoner, a musician/model who posts nudes to Flickr. However, I sense a tiny problem. Almost every picture of the Ms. Stoner appears to be a rather inexpert photochop.
It could be an over-zealous smoothing of imperfections, and there are a couple of images which seem plausible but is anyone buying this stuff? Who’s taking these suspiciously professional glamour shots in a variety of locations, and is there always a shadow delineating her jawbone/cameltoe (which, I’d advise other fakers, is a step to far.) Unless she’s taking these very well produced shots with a phone she bought in 1999, why are the maximum image sizes so small. 407 pixels across suggests an image downloaded from the web, not a camera.
Not very plausible really…
Ms. Stoner, or her defenders, feel free to educate me. Photochopping mavens, feel free to prove me right. In the absence of feedback I’d say over 50% 75% of her work is computer enhanced wishful thinking. Hold back on that fan mail, you’re probably writing to a dude with a Wacom tablet in an Everquest T-Shirt.
407 pixel width in and of itself doesn’t mean much - it’s entirely plausible that a higher res version exists somewhere and a lower res version was saved out of that and uploaded.
But I agree, more than a few of those shots look fishy.
Rich,
It’s not the size being smaller. It’s the randomness of the resize. Why not 400px? I’d say because 407px fits onto the page it was take from. Who resizes all their images at different odd sizes for Flickr? I smell a rat. A rat with intimate knowledge of the blur filter…
I’ve seen plenty of that before from amateur photoshoppers. They use the blur tool rather than the heal/clone tool and just blur the hell out of whatever they’re trying to hide. It looks the worst when done to zits because the coloration difference makes the boo-boo even more apparent, but it almost maybe kinda works in a sloppy way for people trying to soften stretch marks or wrinkles.
If you’re trying to hide wrinkles and stretch marks, the easy solution is to use more light when shooting photos. That works pretty well for hiding skin issues, as does tweaking the hell out of your brightness and contrast.
Everyone gets occasional zits, ingrown hairs, bruises, or other minor things, but I can’t imagine trying to fake an entire face or body, especially with the blur tool. If your skin is that problematic, you should consider some kind of peel or botox or something, not trying to make your images look all weird in photoshop. That’s far more obviously “fake” than a trip to a dermatologist or cosmetic surgeon.
Penelope Cruz’s face on random, yet similar bodies?
Al - It’s definitely not right is it…