I didn't see Tom Cruise. Almost every single person looks better before...it's just uncanny. Why do this? Everyone knows no one has skin like that. Everyone looks vanilla and ridiculous and plastic. Jessica Biel and John Cusack and the guy from Lord of the Rings especially, looked 1000 times better before...why did they take away Jessica's booty?? Rebecca Romijn (or however it's spelled) didn't require much touching-up, did she? Pretty perfect the way she is.

Overall I find this abhorrent. The only touch-up I agreed with was the horrible impant/boob job touch up of whoever that was...Mary K Blige? Ugh. That was a travesty.

And while I may not agree with being touched up, Darryl Hannah should probably be stopped from posing in thigh-baring shots. *shudder*

Pores are ethnic and thus threatening.

The Tom Cruise image is in the Comp/Manip section, I think it's on the second page.

Ah. Bad job to use the same arm and not bother to touch up the creases on the sleeve. People have been taken out of an alarming number of those manips, but I found it amusing that they added Teri Hatcher to the DH photo, after hearing about all the trouble on the set. I guess they didn't want to upset the other women, seeing as how she got center stage.

Or she could have just been sick that day, but I like to create drama whenever possible.

Wow. This is a women's studies lecture just waiting to happen, isn't it?

ha, I like the no doubt picture. They stretched it! Amazing.

I wonder how TV shows will respond when high definition television becomes more popular.

Anyone working on an algorithm to post-process digitized film to automatically airbrush the actors?

Or is the answer advances in makeup technology?

I've heard that news reports don't like hd because even with all that makeup you can still see imperfections in the anchors appearance. Lord forbid.

Computer generated news anchors!

(I heard there was uproar over switching to HD was that the studios had to spend $$$ to upgrade the cheapo sets.)

This whole site makes me profoundly uneasy. I expect it, I know they do it, I know it's fake as fuck. But it does something to my head that is really really OFF.

Here's to the profundity of the wrong, of the wrinkled and the weary, the wrecked and wasted real.

I spent like, 15 minutes clicking back and forth on the Paris Hilton/other girl whose name I forget picture. Seriously creepy.

And while I may not agree with being touched up, Darryl Hannah should probably be stopped from posing in thigh-baring shots. *shudder*

Actually it's cheered me up no end to see that Daryl Hannah has got cellulite.

This is a fascinating website. I don't know the names of most of the celebs on there, but there's one woman in the Before/After section, page 3, left column, second from bottom, a blonde. In her 'before' picture her face is so much more interesting and beautiful than the airbrushed smoothness of the 'after' one.

Where's Darryl Hannah? Did I miss her? (I thought I looked at pretty much everything.) Or has she had so much plastic surgery that I just didn't recognize her? (I frequently have this problem, especially since after leaving the U.S. I only see some people at intervals of several years.)

Of course, most of these people I didn't recognize anyway.

I'm actually pretty glad, at least in terms of this phenomenon, that I'm as old as I am... I think that the way things are moving, regular, ordinary people are going to routinely be expected to get plastic surgery for any nonconforming feaure, and will be sneered at if they don't.

It's strange. I suppose many of these edits are done in the name of simplifying the image and removing "distractions". In doing so they sometimes remove any personality the model has (there were a few girls there who have very sweet smiles in the before photos that look totally bland after).

Another interesting thing is that some of these girls are virtually starving themselves to look good and then these guys have to remove all the dark shadows from their bony knees and elbows. And that attrocious boob job that iconomy mentioned is another great example of a woman destroying her appearance in an attempt to look better. Weird.

They have freckles, pimples, wrinkles, shiny skin and cellulite just like we do. We usually see just the finished "product" (and product it is). It's a nice reminder to see how human these people really are.

God forbid any of them should actually look human. I would say that all of this is fairly futile, because the moment they are in a film, stuff like this becomes much harder to hide. But, with technology being what it is and film budgets being what they are, how long before they start budgeting a couple of million to do this is every frame of a film? If the technology isn't here yet, it also isn't that far away probably.