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Pin-Up Girls – Before And After Shots

1950s, Erotica, USA 17 Apr 2012

So you thought that Photoshopping models was a new practice? These 1950s pin-up photos show that there was just as much retouching going on 60 years ago. In the 1950′s Photoshop gave way to paintings and reference photos.
The photographer was Gil Elvgren and models Janet Rae and Myrna Hansen who was Miss USA in 1953.

Gil Elvgren models pinups

17 Comments

...love Maegan
April 21, 2012 at 5:39 am

LOVE this!!

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rebeccazg
April 21, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Love these also

Even though I love the paintings, part of what is great here is seeing how completely crazy the women seem pulling these ‘super kissy pout’ faces actually in a photo/ real life its a little scary

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proudlittlepixie
April 22, 2012 at 3:49 am

I love this. I did not know this is how he made these pictures.

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prefer not to disclose
April 23, 2012 at 2:02 am

is it photoshopic or just a copy from original photo with new model and new camera?

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redforman
April 23, 2012 at 4:26 pm

That is what I was thinking. I tried looking in the back round of the photos to see any new technology that wouldn’t be there during the fifties. Didn’t really find anything…

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Dan Jones
April 24, 2012 at 12:06 am

This is just a painting based on a reference photo. It’s not touching up a photo. I’m pretty sure air brushes existed in the 50s and they used them in real photography.

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cortney
April 23, 2012 at 11:22 pm

It is called reference photos; we do it all the time, get a friend to pose a certain way we need them too. It is not the same as photoshop

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cortney
April 23, 2012 at 11:24 pm

Still love the post though!

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steve angstrom
April 24, 2012 at 12:58 am

The author seems confused, Gil Elvgren was a painter and the images you see here are the models for his paintings, and the eventual paintings he made using the reference material. There is no “photoshop” or retouching, unless you think that the mona lisa is also some kind of photoshop job.
Once again, these are simply his reference shots for when the model had gone home, so he could cary on painting.

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swill01
April 25, 2012 at 10:22 pm

These were drawn/painted due to the laws at the time. A photograph of a woman in a pinup pose was pornography, but a drawing was art and not subject to the pornography laws of the day.

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who am i
April 24, 2012 at 6:12 am

i believe that digital image editing was discovered in the late 80s.

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Lisa
April 24, 2012 at 3:57 pm

The models at the time were used as reference for the later painted images no different than wild life photography in exotic lands for the artist to reference to them for later works of art. These images where for advertising, men’s magazines, calendars. There are so many artists that used this technique, Vargas, Bolles, Ballantyne, Runci, Withers to name a few. They were not “touching up” the models, simply creating a desirable fantasy with artistic skill.

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Chiru
April 29, 2012 at 6:01 pm

There is a huge difference between these artistic renderings (and honestly, the faces totally look like caricatures, it’s obvious they’re not real people in the final print) and photoshopped REAL women. Photoshopped women are real women whose beauty is artificially enhanced without a nod to it being fiction. At least in these older images it’s obviously a created, artistic ideal rather than a real woman forced into a false image.

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steve gerecke
July 30, 2012 at 12:18 am

boris vallejo did the same sort of thing for his amazing illustrations…
He often used his beautiful wife as the model for many of his pieces.

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Mynor
August 3, 2012 at 5:31 pm

Love this post!

… and got the point…

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