I have a confession: When I go on vacation, I usually pick up a Star. It's the perfect thing to shut off my intellect and begin to relax... Maybe it's the dearth of real news and reciprocal abundance of useless trivia (as my friend Halie mentioned in her stand-up routine, "Victoria Beckham's waist is 23 inches, the same circumference as a soccer ball!"), but I suspect it's more likely the stupid photos of celebrities--and the horrendous retouching and effects--that really gets me having fun.
For someone who truly understands how to use Photoshop, it's easy (and fun!) to spot and decode the mistakes of amateur photo techs:
• relying on the airbrush tool to even skin tone
• overwhitening eyes and teeth (check out the Celebrity Hairstyles cover for another good example of this)
• oversaturating colors or doing no color-correction• drastically changing the shapes of celebrity's features
• outlining people with the magic lasso
• sloppily pasting together photos (check out the cover of Star above... which I saw at the grocery tonight... I think they copied Angelina's face onto a Jennifer Garner's body and forgot to take out Jen's bangs)
For the record, owning Adobe Suite applications doesn't necessarily make you a designer.
It does, however, help me relax on vacation, and that's worth something.
P.S. SECRETS & LIES!
