Harper’s Bazaar and Elle have both recently published unretouched photo spreads in their magazines. Now the French edition of Marie Claire has taken it a step further and gone totally Photoshop-free for its April issue. The models aren’t even wearing makeup!

However, not everyone is totally psyched at the lack of post-production work. As fashion beauty editor Frédérique Renaut writes for BenjaminKanarekBlog.com:

Turning the pages of the April issue of French Marie Claire I see that the photographers had to use the old technique ’s before Photoshop existed…

Burning out the skin using overexposure, soft light, adding a half blue filter to whiten the skin, pulled back images, large smile’s for celebrities so their nasal labial folds are hidden, pulled back hair with hands stretching the skin and smoothing the wrinkles. Using grainy film and converting the images to black and white to neutralize the skin tones.

This is where I see digital retouching as necessary! Necessary for making banal images more interesting and a little more dreamy…

What do you think? Do fashion photographs benefit from a little fantasy, or is the retouching-rejection trend simply refreshing?