For years I’ve said that you simply can’t believe your eyes anymore. The very first time I scanned in some 4×6 prints of pictures I’d taken in Colorado and used PhotoShop to “clean them up”, I realized the power of digital retouching. The coolest one was when I deleted a guard rail and recreated one of my feet so that it looked like I was out in the wilderness, instead of standing next to a road. It took me five minutes to teach my mom how to “stamp out” lead ropes and ugly background buildings in the pictures of their horses.

It’s now a full fledged industry, not only turning wrinkled, freckled, and baggy eyed actresses into ravishing, sex-goddess cover shots, but also piecing together video so you can fly through the interiors of luxury cars while they’re blazing across the dessert at 100 miles per hour.

Just to show off their talents, some retouch artists enter contests on a site called worth1000.com (as in “A picture is worth…”). My favorites are where they do the exact opposite of what they get paid for, like artificially aging Katie Holms.

There’s a short demo real on YouTube the shows just what today’s marketing wizards have at their displosal. Click to watch “Everything you see is fake.”

There’s a company called iWANEX that retouches celebrity photos. Click to go to the iWANEX web site, then click on “Portfolio”. Click on a thumbnail to open it, then mouse-over and mouse-off of the picture to compare the before to the after. It will really rock your world. (My favorite is Kelly Clarkson’s amazing chin and butt reduction.)