Lies, Damn Lies and Photoshop: Superhuman Skin Edition

I talk a lot about heavy Photoshopping and why I don’t do it, and here’s an excellent example of why. (I’ll leave the photographer who took this out of it, but you can reverse image search to find them.)

This is a lovely photograph, and at first glance this model simply seems to have perfect, glowing skin. But when you take a closer look, it’s clear that the skin is too perfect. There are no lines or pores or texture. NO ONE has skin like that, I don’t care what your genetics or skin-care routine are. It’s humanly impossible.

So let’s look at what’s going on here. From a technical standpoint, there are two commons ways to smooth skin in postprocessing. One is a tool in a piece of photography software called Adobe Lightroom, and one is a tool in Photoshop. (In the film days, this is what the old Vaseline-on-the-lens trick was for.)

The tool in Lightroom is a brush that de-sharpens whatever it touches, and the Photoshop tool does the same but, with sufficient skill in shoppery, leaves some of the skin texture intact. It looks like this photographer used the first option, since this skin has no texture whatsoever.

How can I tell that this is fake and not a woman whose skin we, too, can achieve the perfection of if we just work hard enough? Look at her lips, for one thing. See how the bottom lip is weirdly heavily textured, compared to everything else, while the top lip has the smoothness of the skin around it? The photographer brushed over the top lip with the smoothing brush and left the bottom lip alone, hence the difference.

Also, look at her eyelids. See how most of the eyelid is once again unnaturally smooth, but the skin behind her eyelashes is textured and seems a little grainy? That’s because photographers want their portraits to have nice sharp eyelashes, but it would take ages to smooth the skin between each eyelash, so they simply didn’t use the smoothing brush around the eyelashes at all.

I could go on, but the point here is that this. is. not. what. human. beings. look. like. This photographer is a little more heavy-handed than a really advanced photoshopper, but I 100% guarantee you that these processes are being used on almost everything you’re seeing online and in the media. Almost everything you are being shown is a lie.