Expert: Scott Valentine - 12/1/2007

Question
hi

i want to ask your opinion about a photo that leaked from mail to mail. this is the cover of the greek mag nitro with a greek star on the cover :

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v675/onyx79/vandicovernitro-1.jpg

and this is a pic that was mailed to several people as the "before" pic :

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v675/onyx79/vandinl6.jpg

could the "before" pic, not be real but the one that was really retouched?

thank you!

Answer
Without a thorough investigation, it's impossible to tell. However, I can tell you that photo retouching is pretty much the standard for magazines, and that it's much more difficult to make a believable "before" picture such as this than to retouch to a glamour shot.

Given that lots of photoretouchers are showing their portfolios online, specifically before and after shots, I'd be willing to bet this is an actual "before" picture.

The problems in creating the "before" picture are in the details. She not only has some blemishes and wrinkles, she also has a sock line, a waistband line, a straight back, etc. All of these things are not individually difficult, but to create all of them so convincingly would be extremely challenging.

Having seen literally thousands of retouched images for professional commercial work, I could believe quite easily that these are in the correct order. Mostly because I've never seen a magazine cover of a model that wasn't retouched, and most models have some kind of feature (hair, spots, shadows, fat, clothing marks, etc.) that needs to be fixed.

It would also be very difficult to extract that image from the magazine cover, considering the text and soft gradients.