How Good (And Bad) Retouching Impacts Your Objective Age

A few days ago it started – suddenly these portraits sprouted everywhere like mushrooms after the rain, with pictures of people and a postit note on their forehead which states their age.

Behind this fed is a new “service” called how-Old, which claims to give an accurate guesstimate of your age based on a single photo. As a retoucher I often encounter this problem; a model still has a few more years to “steal” or actually to “give” to the industry. I had to test how many years I can take of a model with retouching and while this is a lighthearted post, the results were quite interesting.

1) The Original Photograph

Our 17-year-old model has aged 13 years old – or at least so says the algorithm.

2) After Retouching

This version was retouched the ‘old’ way, using mostly Dodge & Burn. Not bad, we shaved 4 years off.

3) Black & White

The conversion to a black and white image will cost another year. (but is still better than the unretouched photo by 3 years)

4) color look up table

A color look is as even better – a LUT applied gives us another 3 years! bringing us to only +7 years from the real age.

5) micro contrasts

Men Portraits – especially by sailors – are welcome to some micro-contrast (as popularly called “clarity” filter). If you push the slider all the way to the left, you get this’ 70s film look grubby and win 2 years at the same time.

6) The Gaussian Blur

A crud Gaussian Blur filter finally manages to get the model down to her real age – 17 – whether it actually looks good…. you are allowed to decide for yourself.