Kerry Washington Doesn’t Hate All Photoshopping, Just Some Photoshopping
Photoshopping the faces and bodies of famous people is a tricky business. Some famous people, like Lena Dunham or Kate Winslet, will slap a bitch for retouching their pictures too much. Others, like Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, or the Kween of the Liquefy Tool herself Kim Kardashian, won’t sign off on a Photoshop job until the person in the picture looks like the Total Drama Island version of themselves. Last week, Kerry Washington sort-of came out as a member of Team No Photoshop when she called out a picture of herself on the cover of Adweek looking not a whole lot like Kerry Washington. And now Kerry wants to clarify her own Photoshop beliefs.
UsWeekly says Kerry spoke about her Adweek Photoshop incident at Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul Session conference on Saturday. According to Kerry, she’s not here for Photoshop work that makes people wonder who they’re looking at. However, she is still here for the kind that makes your face look like you haven’t been binge watching old episodes of Blind Date on YouTube till 3am.
“I want to be really honest. Photoshopping is not the devil. It’s not all horrible. I’ve had days where I show up to the cover of a magazine and I’m in a more hormonal moment of the month and I may have a big red dot [on my forehead]. When I had comments last week about a cover that I felt uncomfortable with, the response was like, ‘You don’t need anything’ and I was like, ‘Honey, I need something sometimes.’ And a wrinkle in the dress, you want to smooth that out — that’s great.”
She adds that the Adweek thing was a whole lot different than just smoothing out some wrinkles, because she “didn’t recognize” the person on the cover. Okay, but to be fair, it might not have been the photo editor’s fault. There were so many busy patterns going on in that picture that they probably got hypnotized and fell into a catatonic state. But they still had a deadline to meet, so their brain went into famous person picture retouching autopilot. “Is it a famous person? Check. Will I be applying every filter and blur tool known to Adobe? Check. Do we know who it is anymore? Nope! But I’m sure they’ll let us know on social media when the issue comes out.“