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Airbrushing
15 April 2007Alterations made to a baseball card, basketball card, football card, or other sports card - usually to correct minor imperfections, errors, or photographic mistakes. Typically involves changes made to logos on the hats or uniforms of the player depicted. Technique used by artists. Card companies like Topps were notorious for making minor changes to their card photographs using the airbrushing method. For example, the 1969 Topps Paul Popovich (card # 47) shows airbrushing done on the emblem and helmet.
Today, the need for touchups on baseball cards using the airbrushing technique has been eliminated since digital technology has arrived. Wikipedia describes the process of airbrushing this way:
Airbrushing has long been used to alter photographs in the pre-digital era. In skilled hands it can be used to help hide signs that an image has been extensively retouched or "doctored".
As a result of Stalin’s purges, and later destalinization, many photographs of officials from the periods show extensive airbrushing, often entire people have been removed. The term "airbrushed out" has come to mean rewriting history to pretend that something was never there.
The term "airbrushed" or "airbrushed photo" has also been used to describe glamour photos in which a model’s imperfections have been removed, or in which their attributes have been enhanced. The term has often been applied in a pejorative manner to describe images of unrealistic female perfection and has been particularly common in reference to pictures in Playboy magazine.
Using today’s digital imaging technology, this kind of picture editing is now usually done with a raster image editor, which is capable of even more subtle work in the hands of a skilled touch-up artist. This technique is still called airbrushing or photoshopping.
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