Prior to make-up I actually made a lot of money out of fooling people for roughly almost 7 years. I’ve made celebrities thinner, obliterated eye bags, made wrinkles vanish, made hair flow seamlessly all using digital magic at the tap of a pen, or before that a mouse…for hours, days, nights, holidays, and weekends. Oh, how I’ve contributed to the beauty industry if only people knew. I worked for two among the country’s top post production outlets, the latter of which then accounted for roughly 1/3 of all commercials then airing on national TV. It was a 7 year staring contest with a computer monitor. The longest I hadn’t slept was a day and a half or was it a day and three-fourths, pushed to the limit so much so that one’s eye is twitching, gall bladder bursting, lips flaking, and dinner on one’s desk remains unnoticed, on top of it all the race to the finish for an approval from client is anything but short yet they want it to be. I loved my job to a certain degree and even more so the people in it, but I fled for my life literally…because I wanted it back and my body and soul (and whatever remaining beauty I possessed, LOL) could not take an ounce of it anymore. Even so, after a year of resigning, the process still tugs at me and the know-how to some extent remains in my fingertips. I just needed to edit and art direct a photo with all the proper polish and digital restraint one can muster.
Photo editing is EVERYWHERE, but there’s a very fine line for my liking between post processing it just enough and taking away a photo’s integrity. If I suddenly notice where someone’s blur mask begins and ends it makes me want to throw a fit. I know I worked side by side with the best “tsismis” spotters in the country. For my blog reviews I don’t post process photos like this with masks, blurs, none of that…I just brighten or level the photos or color correct the lighting if it’s gone slightly off tangent in levels of green or blue in the histogram readings, that’s all I do for proper blog posts. For your scrutiny here is the original photo.
I photo edited the first photo in this way, lightened the eyebags but didn’t erase them because that’s just unreal. Because I have “lazy eye” causing me to be ever so slightly cross-eyed sometimes without my glasses I nudged the iris of the photo’s right eye an eensy-weensy bit to the right because it was veering toward the bridge of the nose too much. I converted the photo to grayscale mode for more drama and to allow me to eliminate those bothersome shadows across the face. Only major thing was I added eyeshadow and eyeliner using only feathered masks in Gimp software (opensource program like Photoshop) and I darkened the brows. I adjusted levels, curves…wala lang. Matagal na this photo, mga 2 months, when I first tried gray contact lenses. I’ve missed doing minor but RESPECTABLE photo editing. I guess in small ways, I still can’t let go of post production.
