As magazine photographer between 1977 and until recently when magazines, newspapers and journalism began to fail, when possible I counted on a good makeup artist for my editorial portraits. Besides makeup a good makeup person prepared my subjects to what is really an ordeal which is to face a large camera in a studio.
I am also old enough to have watched the Nixon/Kennedy debates in the rec room poolhall at my boarding school in Austin, Texas to have noticed how Nixon was not wearing Max Factor’s pancake makeup.
And with the use of Photoshop all these years or printing colour negatives I am aware like many other photographers are that a cyan cast on a face can make a person look cold and dishonest.
My 13 year old Photoshop’s Patch Tool can make quick work in removing bags (ojeras in Spanish)from Kellyanne Conway’s face. My eldest daughter Alexandra now close to 50 had ojeras from the time she was 20. No cucumber slices will help.
There are two solutions (besides your excellent one that these people hire a good professional) to it all. One is that inevitably someone will invent a digital video tool that will instantly correct her bags.
The second one is a more practical but probably untenable one anyway. This is that we must accept that people, and particularly women have skin pores. There has been too much softening of women’s faces in magazines (the Photoshop tool used to be called Diffuse Glow!) so we have become used to that look. Women of a certain age post pictures of themselves in Facebook that have been softened or manipulated. Their friends (I would shoot myself if I had to read these) comment, “Still beautiful!” Ugh!
To this Latin man Conway’s ojeras make her look like she had a sleepless night having indulged in extended sex-play. I find that attractive. But then that’s me.
In years past, even on TV, they had good lighting. Now stuff has to be so quick that the lights or lack of them will not flatter anybody.
For the picture below I disaturated it to make it less intense. I added some cyan to make it less red and I used the Patch Tool.
