> > On some of the breast enhancements, like for the middle woman in the sink photo, one goal is obviously to make them symmetrical to the viewer. But if you pause a moment and notice the angle of the woman's shoulders, your eyes compensate and she becomes very lopsided.
>
> What really got me about that photo was that nothing seemed strange until I saw the original. Then I looked again at the retouched version and couldn't stand it. It just looked SO very wrong.
>
> I started thinking about how many "anatomically impossible" (to use Ria's phrase) photos we look at without even realizing that anything is abnormal.

I've noticed this a lot with the Poser work I've being doing lately. Poser is the program I used to create the character illustrations for Murkon's Vengeance and am now using to create illustrations for the next Role-Player's Vault game. MV was done with Poser 4, which had less detailed and accurate models, so I didn't notice it so much with that, but I'm now using Poser 6, which is much more realistic. Anyway, sometimes I find myself posing a character in a certain way, and it looks natural from some angles and totally wrong from other angles. Something about viewing a 3D subject in a 2D image changes our perceptions just enough that certain contours just look wrong. If the image is a moving image, this problem seems to go away, presumably because the motion provides greater information about the true 3D structure, and our brains are less likely to interpret incorrectly.

Anyway, one of the retouched photos on that web site flattened out the contour of the back of someone's neck, which originally looked like a vaguely unnatural protrusion. It was weird, because I've done that exact same thing in Poser.

The most dramatic case of this was exactly the situation you describe: a monster is posed at an angle, body facing forward and left of the viewer, the monster's left arm and leg closer to the frame than the right arm and leg. The pose involved small bends and twists of the torso, which looked just fine when I oscillated the camera around the model to look at it from all kinds of different angles -- but when I got the camera where I wanted to render the image from, it happened to be an angle that made it look like one pectoral muscle was about six inches lower than the other. If you looked carefully at the shoulders and hips, it all made sense, but at first glance it just looked ghastly. So I had to change the bends in the torso so that the positions of things not only *were* correct but *looked* correct. A retoucher of a photograph unfortunately doesn't have this option and so must choose between one or the other.

There's a less dramatic example I can provide the image for. The "Teresa Subscribes To RinkWorks" ad (http://www.rinkworks.com/ads/im/ad_rsub1.png) was one of the most troublesome of that series to create, and after I was all done, I noticed that her jawbone sticks out on her right (our left) more than I'd think it should. It's not something you notice right off, but if you stare at that part of the jaw, it looks, to me, that it just sticks out too much. There's a contour that comes down from the cheekbone up above it, and it seems to me that if the jawbone were not at all visible behind it, the picture would look better.

It's not a problem with the Poser model. In Poser, if you revolve the camera around, the jawbone looks right from any other angle. To me, it looks wrong only from this particular angle. It's very subtle, though, and I didn't think anybody else would notice it as a problem, so I left it. But it illustrates how sometimes this kind of thing happens. And that's not even with real, flawed human bodies but with Poser models, which are designed to be flawlessly proportioned in the first place.