How to shop a picture and be up-front about it

I think this is the modern digital-photographic equivalent of what conscientious restorers of museum objects have been done for decades: when you put a Greek vase or a medieval garment back together for display, you use some contrastingly neutral material for the parts that are missing, plain grey linen among all the tyrian-purple-and-gold, or some white clay for the parts of the delicate red-figures vase that remains missing. If broken statues have hands, but not arms, they get steel bars or thin pieces of concrete.

This is what you do when you want to photoshop the background out from a candid picture of a celebrity and make a point of how honest you are, and that you're not 'shopping' the picture: you roughly outline the real object of the picture, then invert the selection and blur the rest. Roughly enough to leave that odd halo-like margin of in-focus background, but still well enough to focus solely on what you want to show.

I must admit it looks odd, but I guess we'll get used to it.-



Of course, Christina Hendricks looks stunning as always. And if this new principle gives me an excuse to repost the picture of her which I found it on, all the better...


[[From here]]