There are a great many choices made between photons striking the sensor and photons from your computer screen striking your eyes. In the absence of Photoshop, they're made by an engineering team's best guess at a general procedure for transforming the raw electrical data into a photorealistic scene, but these algorithms do not have a special claim on the truth and the parameters they choose are not necessarily "right." In some situations (such as rooms with unusual color-temperature light sources) they are unambiguously wrong.
Professionals use Photoshop when they disagree with the choices made by the on-camera chip, which is almost all of the time. Working from RAW, you can start fresh from something closer to raw sensor data and move the sliders for yourself. But those sliders have to be somewhere, effectively, and taking manual control of them (or overriding them with further transformations) doesn't make a photo less real. It's much more like copy-editing.
Most images you see are Photoshopped, but most of the editing (and all of the editing in journalism) is done with the intention of making the photo a more accurate representation of what the photographer saw.
Where you get people editing photos to make them more than what was really there is in art. Ansel Adams made choices in the darkroom motivated by aesthetics rather than accuracy, and he was damn good at it. I'm sure most glamour photographers would tell you they're engaged in a similar kind of artistry.
I'm less interested in fashion magazines creating unrealistic representations of the human form than why people believe these are credible ideals to aspire to, rather than mildly amusing curiosities.
The Photoshop manipulation has very little distortion — the camera engineer could not have produced these images, and the intention is entirely to make the image /less/ like what the photographer saw.
(It isn't just women. Yesterday's junk catalogue is illustrated with perfect-looking children and teenagers, sometimes with perfect-looking parents.)
[Edited links, I pasted them the wrong way around.]
Professionals use Photoshop when they disagree with the choices made by the on-camera chip, which is almost all of the time. Working from RAW, you can start fresh from something closer to raw sensor data and move the sliders for yourself. But those sliders have to be somewhere, effectively, and taking manual control of them (or overriding them with further transformations) doesn't make a photo less real. It's much more like copy-editing.
Most images you see are Photoshopped, but most of the editing (and all of the editing in journalism) is done with the intention of making the photo a more accurate representation of what the photographer saw.
Where you get people editing photos to make them more than what was really there is in art. Ansel Adams made choices in the darkroom motivated by aesthetics rather than accuracy, and he was damn good at it. I'm sure most glamour photographers would tell you they're engaged in a similar kind of artistry.
I'm less interested in fashion magazines creating unrealistic representations of the human form than why people believe these are credible ideals to aspire to, rather than mildly amusing curiosities.