Photo Retouching

Photo retouching

Yezhov is clearly visible to Stalin's left. The photo was later altered by censors.

Further information: Photo manipulation

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".
In the 20th century Soviet Union, as a result of Stalin's purges and later destalinization, many photographs of officials from the periods show extensive airbrushing; often entire human figures have been removed. The term "airbrushed out" has come to mean rewriting history to pretend that something was never there. In contemporary academic discourse, the process of removing components from an image is formally known as object removal.
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, and later Maxim.^{[citation needed]}
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. In the fine retouching industry, the airbrushing technique is often considered a low-end practice, with significantly inferior quality to that found in the most important fashion photography publications.