Doll Eyes

Ok, I'd love to start this entry with an illustrative picture, but I haven't been able to confirm if it is legal and since I won't only be writing complements, I'll skip it this time around. So before you read the rest of this post, take a quick look at Toni Overby's site. Just the front page will do, you'll instantly get the background you need. Note to self: figure out when I can post other people's pictures and when I can't.

Apparently, it is possible to make a decent living by taking pictures of young girls made up to look like grown women and retouching them into plastic doll-like approximations. From what I can tell, Toni Overby literally clones in doll's eyes. Yes, she replaces a girls eyes with eyes from a doll. And Toni O. isn't the only one, take a look at this retouching artist (nicknamed Crazy Doll Lady) -- she'll take a young girl and swap out the eyes, mouth, and soul!

BTW, I should cite my sources: these three threads on DPC. While you're at it, Something Awful has a hilarious post about a quasi-legal interaction with the second retouching artist. This post (and the links) could easily be a waste of an hour :)

Look, I totally understand that some retouching is necessary, unless you are a photojournalist. Minor fixes are a simple way to remove seriously distracting (but still minor) items from a picture. And, if you want to get more extreme, Worth1000 has lots of advanced Photoshop contests -- there is a place for heavily photoshopped images too, although I consider them more computer art than photographs.

For instance, in a recent TFCD photo (which already required some heavy processing to save the image from my mistake) A. was squeezing D. so hard her neck made a strange bulge (as a photographer, I should have caught that, but my (lack of) posing is for another post). Now, D. has a fine neck and this is just a result of a strong child. In fact, the whole family is very photogenic, and I did very little retouching over all. But I wanted to fix the photo so it didn't look like D. had a goiter.


So, a few minutes with the smudge tool in PSP XI and I brought her neck to where it was supposed to be. Above are the before and after crops. Does it look completely normal? No. Does it look edited? I don't think so, but judge for yourself in the image below. My goal was just to get rid of a visual artifact that could draw the eye.


FYI, smudge will let you drag a group of pixels, stretching and blurring the pixels nearby to make it look semi-normal. It works great if the background isn't textured.
I believe liquify is the equivalent in PhotoShop.


Anyway, back to Toni Overby and company.

Let's face it, everyone does retouching. I doubt a magazine cover is ever submitted to the printer without retouching. According to Photomedic (here and here), it is pretty standard in the fashion industry to make "Hollywood eyes", or increase a model's eye size by 8%. And if you haven't seem them yet, look at the Dove 'evolution' video and the portfolios of some of the magazine cover retouchers -- downright amazing what they can do (move the mouse over the images to see the wrinkles melt away and the breasts plump up!).

And if you are female, I hope those sites put the reality of beauty into perspective versus the fantasy you see in magazines.


Toni Overby and Crazy Doll Lady go to the extreme of adding something that was never there in the first place. As a father of a three year old girl, I find it appalling that not only are these girls under pressure to look pretty in pageants but now they're being told that they have the wrong eyes and mouth (among other things in CDL's lists).

Yeah, that's a quick way to develop an image disorder, which most women seem to acquire anyway (at least to a small degree) without much help. I sincerely hope the girls don't see those retouching pages.

Is there a place for that type of retouching? Yes, if people will pay for it, artists will fill that void. Obviously, there are some parents out there that do want their daughters to be retouched into dolls.

But you won't catch me increasing the size of my daughter's eyes -- they're huge already!

Quick Tip #7: Save Underexposure With RAW

On Saturday night I shot my second set of free portraits on location at Stanford University.

Sounds fancy, doesn't it? I like saying "on location", even thought I only traveled about a mile to do it. But I digress...

One more digression: the business plan post is still in the works, but I wanted to get this post hammered out while it was fresh.

Anyway... The shoot went pretty well, if you consider me running from place to place like a headless chicken "pretty well". We were rapidly losing light and rapidly losing the patience of the young lady. I proved my inexperience a number of times, starting by shooting the first series using my Tamron 17-50mm at 30mm (not horrible, but not as flattering to noses as it can be). The real mistake was when moving from the first location lit directly by the setting sun to the second location in one of the many semi-shaded walkways -- I forgot to switch from manual (for the flash) to aperture priority. I also never chimped during the sequence (because I could tell they were coming out well). The result was an underexposure of 3+ stops and while I let my clients know and reshot at that location later, the expressions on their faces the first time were better than the second.

The sad part is this stuff happens, even to experienced photographers (although I'm sure pros have it happen very rarely compared to someone new like... uh... me). Thank goodness RAW is there to save the day. I was able to save this image (the split before/after image is at the top of this entry, click to see larger) and will include it in what I show the clients.

The beauty of a RAW file is that it holds more information than a JPEG (which I discussed earlier) allowing you to compensate for underexposure, and in some cases, overexposure. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how much overexposure is needed to blow out a RAW file. In my case, I had a Canon .CR2 file, but I'm sure you could do all this with the Nikon equivalent.

Technically, there should be no difference in image quality between RAW and JPEG if you have your lighting and exposure right. But mistakes happen...

I try to shoot RAW any time the photos are more than snapshots and it'd be difficult to replicate them. Sometimes, if I am doing people pictures in a controlled environment, I'll use JPEG even though quality is something important (like a contest). For everything else, I use either RAW or the RAW+JPEG combination. The RAW+JPEG is nice, but I find it slows me down in post processing so I tried pure RAW on Friday and I didn't miss the JPEGs at all.

Let me take you through the process of saving this portrait:


1. Here's a 200% crop of D.'s hand approximately how it would look if I had been shooting JPEG. Obviously, it is way underexposed.


2. The first step is to increase the exposure in RawShooter Essentials (RSE). In this case, I went up a full three stops (the max) and added some fill light, along with a little saturation and white balance. Much better, but we amplified the noise when we fixed the exposure!


3. So, my first attempt to reduce the noise is to use RSE. I pushed the Noise Suppression slider up about half way (Color Noise Suppression seemed to have no result on this image). I use a little noise suppression in almost all the images I convert in RSE. I find RSE doesn't do as good of a job as other software, but it also never hurts the detail in the image.


4. The result still wasn't good enough, so I took the RSE result (without noise suppression, #2) and ran it through Neat Image (NI). Neat Image is a great piece of software which can even integrate directly (plug-in) with PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro Photo XI. Of course, I'm a cheap guy, so I've only used the free version which lets you save high quality JPEGs. I rarely use any of the sliders and options since the auto-profiler does a great job on my images. At right you can see a Neat Image in action -- if you've never seen it before, click to see the full size screen capture and prepare to be amazed!

PSP XI also includes pretty decent noise reduction ("Digital Camera Noise Removal") but I generally prefer Neat Image if image quality really matters and/or the noise is severe.


So, that's it. The end result is that shooting RAW let me save an image that would have been destined for deletion, and I'll show the (processed) version to the client with the rest of the images at the viewing. After all, they did a great job (and helped me out by posing) and I'd hate to have good poses lost from my own incompetence!

Along with that, I think I'll start shooting RAW only for my portrait sessions. The ability to save myself from exposure mistakes is well worth the increase in file size.

Quick Tip #6: Add RAW To Your Trick Bag

If you know what RAW is and understand how to use it, you can probably skip this tip. If you don't (which seems to be a lot of photographers, including some professionals), you might want to give it a read.

RAW is an image format, just like JPG or PNG. The difference is, a RAW file contains all the data from the camera sensor instead of a processed version. Essentially, a RAW file is a digital camera negative. Each camera maker (and sometimes each camera model) uses their own RAW file format, but most popular software can process the files from most popular cameras (Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc).

WHY use RAW? To get the most data from your images. Humans can only distinguish about 8 bits (256 shades) of light intensity per RGB component. Monitors only show about 6-8 bits. But digital cameras collect 12-14 bits per pixel. The result is a file that contains more data which you can't see (and is 3-4 times larger). Why is that useful? That invisible data lets you bring own shadow or highlight details. It also lets you recover information if you make an exposure mistake.

HOW to use RAW? While Photoshop, Picasa 2, and Paint Shop Pro XI (among others) have RAW support built in, you are often better off using a stand-alone utility. There are many utilities out there, and many cost a pretty penny. But, RawShooter Essentials 2006 is completely free, very powerful, and very fast and easy to use once you get used to it.

Although Pixmantec was acquired by Corel (and RSE is no longer supported), RSE can still be found on the web at places like download.com. It will bug you when you start it about trying to reach a server, but it works fine once you click through the initial window.

WHAT does RAW let you do? Well, take the backlit flower at the start of this article. To set this up, I placed my trusty desk lamp behind the flower and shot into it, but because I didn't want to blow the highlights the center ended up being too dark. So, since I took the shots in RAW, I exported from RSE to a 16-bit TIFF, loaded it in PSP XI, and used Curves to bring out the details in the center (PSP XI allows you to use Curves in 16-bit depth). At right you can see the Curves screen, and see just how much I adjusted the exposure and boosted the shadows.

Before and after results from the flower center are below. I don't usually bother with RAW unless I'm shooting for a contest or for future printing; in other words, only when I'm going beyond a simple snapshot and I might need to do some heavy adjustment later.

RAW is just one more tool you should know how to use.