Being that I'm a designer and a photographer who knows quite a bit about photoshop, I know that photo retouching is a major trick of the trade. It's one of those hush hush industry standards that no one really talks about. It happens and it happens a lot, a lot more than you might think. Whether it's as simple as recroping a photo or as complex as a full on digital manipulation, almost all digital photography out there has been retouched in some way or other.

I myself retouch just about every digital image I work with. I don't really touch my personal snapshots too often, but I will admit I've even retouched those from time to time, although it's usually nothing more than fixing the lighting or cropping.

On the other hand though, professionally, I've done some photoshopping in my day. Every image that goes up on DrJays.com has been manhandled and half of the time I'm the one who manhandles them. One time a family photo contained my grandma and every singe one of her 24 grandkids except for me, so I photoshopped myself into it. I photoshopped Thad's photo of Natasha and you wouldn't believe what the photo on SunkissedDesigns.com actually looks like.

Outside of those few things though, I rarely mess with the full integrity of a photo. I just make 'em look a little nicer and call it a day. I know that's not the standard in the professional world though. In hollywood, in big corporations, in magazines, in advertisments, etc. major major MAJOR photo retouching is done every day like it's no big thing.

This morning my friend Holly showed me this digital retouching portfolio that both sickened and amazed me. Professionally I couldn't stop trying to find the differences in the before and after photos. But personally it made me go 'this is the kind of shit that makes teenage girls anorexic'.

It's a pretty amazing site, I must say, I was looking at it for most of the morning. But as I was looking at it, I couldn't help but wonder about the ethical codes designers are breaking these days with the amount of photo manipulation that's taking place. Where is that line? Really, how much is too much?

A - Shouldn't a good photographer be able to get the photo right in the first place without having to rely too much on photoshop?

B - What's with this unnatural level of perfection our society is holding itself to?