Photo Retouching

I applied for a job as a photo retoucher.  I have the skills to do a good job of it, but I am not of fan of making people look fake.  In my opinion, Photoshop is great for correcting bad lighting and stuff like that, but I can't stand in when people use it to supposedly "improve skin" and they end up completely removing all of their skin texture.  Seriously, in real life people's skin has texture.  I can't stand all these Internet tutorials that are basically about how to make someone look like some sort of creepy android trying to pass for a human.  Here's a pretty extreme example of what I'm talking about.

 There is really nothing wrong with this photo, but the retoucher is thinking,

"Oh noes! Freckles! Quick, to the unreality maker!"



And then this nonsense happens.  I don't know who in their right mind would think

that this looks better.  They basically just blurred her entire face and removed all of

the texture from everything except her hat.

Unfortunately, there is quite a large job market for people to make other people look fake, or supposedly "perfect".  And the other big problem I have with most photo retouchers is that they constantly make people's skin lighter.  Like they'll take a perfectly fine picture of a woman who has darker skin, remove all the texture from it, and then lighten her skin until she looks Caucasian.  And then she's pretty, according to them.  Newsflash people, there are plenty of beautiful women of all nationalities.  It's not like you can't be pretty unless your skin is white.  That is just not true and incredibly racist.  Haven't you seen Megan Fox?  I'm a straight female and even I can say that she is smokin' hot.  Yet, some photo retouchers feel the need to lighten her skin too.  I just don't understand what is wrong with people.

Anyway, without any further ado, here are two photos I retouched.

I did not make this girl's skin lighter.  I just corrected the lighting of the entire photo,

so this is her actual skin color.  The other thing I did was make her eyes look

more lively by adding a little reflected light to them.

I diminished the appearance of this guy's scar.  Mostly just because people don't like their own scars.  I didn't remove any of his skin texture.  I actually sharpened it a bit.  And I removed the dark circles under his eyes a little bit, while still keeping the photo looking realistic.