Very interesting discussion by Sara Lando on the subject, please read also her replies to the initial tweet.
Related to this another good thread from a while ago:
and following from this discussion:
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I’ve found lately that for my personal work I prefer to leave wrinkles or small blemishes that speak to the character of the person, and work on small things that are transient (pimples for instance, nicks from shaving, maybe a wayward hair or two).
I have actually found that aggressive smoothing on the roughest (as opposed to finest) scales of a wavelet/frequency decomp tends to smooth the overall appearance of skin much more nicely and naturally (in makeup I think this would be analogous to a light foundation). It tends to smooth overall skin color/tone without messing with the details (this is particularly true of men with stubble that you want to keep).
If you’re going to shoot fashion portraits (or just portraits in general), I’d recommend spending some time on makeup videos on YouTube to understand the use, application, and results. It can help to understand why and how makeup is applied once you’re in your editing phase.
This seems to have gotten too meta (irony! :P). Let’s just leave it in the meta category.
The real question is, what is our responsibility as image makers in this regard? If Snapchat is amplifying what fashion/portrait photographers have been doing for years, where do we go?
Is the next portrait movement the unidealized self?
So much character is lost if you smooth out any signs that life left on the body of people.
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