You know how I am not trendy? Not at all interested in being popular? Well, I’m about to become even less trendy and I’m about to lose some friends.
Cuz. I had some pictures done. And I’m mad as a hornet about them. The photographer photoshopped out my freckles. My freckles! Are you kidding me? Fine, take out the second chin. Fine, paste a smiley face onto my child because no one was ever smiling in the same picture. But don’t you DARE touch my freckles!
On second thought, leave the double chin and the grumpy baby – both are an accurate reflection of me.
Photoshopping is out of control. I want a picture of me. Of what I really look like. Not of what a photographer thinks I’d like better than looking like myself. Did you follow that? Leave me alone. I want a picture, not taken with the turn-about feature on my iPhone, that documents for posterity what I look like. And, dang it, I have freckles.
The most memorable family picture we had growing up is one where my baby brother is screaming his red face off. What if a photographer had “fixed” that for us?
I am so not okay with the photoshopping trend gone mad. I don’t like to see pictures of people I know … except, wait, I don’t think their eyes are really THAT blue, are they? I think people are prettier sans airbrushing!
It’s why I usually refuse to have professional pictures done anymore. I only trust my sister-in-law to take our pictures. Because instead of photoshopping, she keeps taking pictures until she gets a good one.
Let me show you.
I don’t love this of me – I’m looking sort of awkward and weird but wait…
Now this, I love. Me with my freckles and my slouching man – looking like we really look.
I like real. I like genuine. A picture should be a reflection, not a dream.
P.S. To all of my photographing, photoshopping friends, I’m probably not talking about you. I mean those other guys.
open book open heart 
I agree 100%. Photoshop should be for the creative artist to enhance his lack of skills, not to erase reality. Freckles are awesome, and they are REAL which makes them even more awesome. I use Picassa, because although I call myself a photographer, I have little talent for knowing how to fix an underexposed image. So I hit a button in Picassa, and suddenly the rain glistens more, or the mountains are sillouhetted perfectly….but I never erase, only enhance. I never add or subtract something on a person, because they are beautiful as themselves. BUT is it wrong to make the image black and white because you like Ansel Adams? Well…I guess only if you add so much light that the image becomes overexposed and erases the freckles, right?