Ethics of Post Production

Retouching photographs has actually been happening since the 1860s. The terms 'airbrushing' comes from when people would actually use a brush to edit photographs. An example of some early retouching can be seen in George Hurrel's 1931 photograph of Joan Crawford:

Every image that we see is retouched even if this is just adjusting brightness and contrast. 

Some images that we see are extremely edited. An example of this is this image of Madonna before and after PhotoShop:

There have also been beauty advertisements that have bee banned due to over editing. An example of this is this Dior campaign, which was banned to to editing on the eyelashes and as said to lie about what the product being sold could actually do:

This campaign, by make-up brand Make-Up Forever, claims to have no retouching. Although there may not be a lot of editing, it's still very unlikely that the contrast and brightness hasn't been adjusted.

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