Years ago “spot the difference” used to be a popular game. AP Jan 2nd has me fooled though. The Before and After edit on p 34 and 35, aside from size and a tiny crop which seems to be all about fitting on the page, seem identical to me.
Both seem to be the before image. On the supposed after image there were several rogue hairs, including one really obvious one across the face that many photographers would erase. Perhaps Ben H would like to post an original good quality file with permission for us to play with it. I would tidy up all those hairs impinging on the face but only some of the stray bits extending too far into the background.
Oops. I have just noticed that the image belongs to Amanda Dorval, so not within Ben's generosity to let us play with it.
That’s what I thought. The hair to be removed seems a bit silly. It is inconceivable that the model be unaware of it. The picture must have been taken to order.
And there I was, thinking that I am stupid because I can't see the difference! And whilst I am at it, why did it take two pages to show a very elementary editing technique? Hopefully anyone who plans to buy the Leica Q2 Monochrom at £4995 reviewed in the same issue will have mastered this. Sublime/ridiculous? Sorry I'm probably a little acidic following seasonal overindulgence!
When I was a child, I recall my father looking at 'spot the difference' competition in the Sunday newspaper. Usually it was a photograph of a famous building or event, with one of the images retouched to remove some objects (lamp post, post box or street sign, for example). One week the 'before' image was accidently printed as both the 'before' and the 'after' images, and only one person out of hundreds of entrants won the prize by correctly stating that there were no differences. Some entrants managed to find lots of differences, probably because they had been told there were some to find. Any similarity between this and the article in AP are, of course, coincidental. More seriously, whenever AP publishes one of their 'how to retouch a digital portrait shot' articles, I usually believe that the 'before' image looks natural and the 'after' image looks exactly the opposite. Sometimes the process is so overdone that the skin looks like plastic and hence the model can look like a barbie doll - presumably this is what the client wants and is willing to pay for.
