Post-Processing, Beauty, Retouching

Photography Desiree Mattsson Model Charli Howard for Pat McGrath Labs

The $532.43 billion dollar Beauty industry is competing with the $2.4 trillion dollar Fashion industry in exposure, interest and accessibility by now. As usual, beauty products are defining beauty - how glossy, slick, smokey, dark, bright, colourful, concealed, highlighted or contoured you look. As well as this, post-processing and retouching in beauty photography is inventing a beauty look also with its technologically applied, post-processed veneers to the skin and contours of the face especially.

Post-processing is a digital process of editing the data captured by the camera while taking the photograph to enhance the image. Previously, in 1992, the verb 'to photoshop' was assimilated into the language when it was added to the English dictionary, describing post-processing and retouching in photography. Retouching was a perfecting process pioneered in the 1860s. Digital retouching, which improves the photograph's appearance, utilizes photo editing software using a number of tools including blurring brushes, colour replacement tools, and clone stamps.

Most people still do not realize the futuristic look of retouched beauty photography is not real. Or else it doesn't matter. There doesn't seem to be any issues with achievability either. A similar evolution in beauty happened in the 1950s with Richard Avedon's 'Dovima With Elephants', dress by Dior, Harper's Bazaar, August 1955, or in Irving Penn's Vogue photographs. Beauty photographer Desiree Mattsson's exquisite and technologically crafted beauty photography, most notably for Pat McGrath's Labs makeup line, see above, is post-Vogue in the success of its effects and it totally surpasses any previous history of beauty photography. As well as defining the look of beauty today, using various media, the Beauty industry with all of its beauty products, the lipstick, the concealer, the mascara, the eyeshadow, will actively reproduce the look of digital, post-processed, retouched beauty photography, in its own products too, advancing, as it progresses, the technology at our fingertips. Evolutionary cosmetics, evolutionary beauty - a useful dimension of glamour.