yeah, they sure do.

Sculpt me, please!

It'd be simple to clone away the bathing suit parts left on the legs.

which, apparently, is a desirable trait by young teens. Perhaps even older ones.

Obviously they butchered it. I suspect that this model is a skinny one to begin with but I guess they could not leave well enough alone.

or one with a limited understanding of the software.

I'm willing to bet most of the outline captures were done with the wand tool, with a overly strong threshold setting. If you notice, the path of the cut away area at her crotch, follows the fold of her underwear. A common occurrence when using that tool, given the background color of her underwear is the same as the true background area, between her legs. The software is having a difficult time distinguishing between the two, at that threshold setting.

The crotch area isn't the only issue.

Which compels me to believe this might not be a nefarious manipulation, as it is simple incompetence.

The underarm area and the arms themselves were botched.

The person who did this was either a subversive or a rank amateur who worked cheap but didn't know when to stop.

Actually, I don't think it was clipped, rather erased with the eraser tool by hand... sloppy.

Look at the arms, the shoulders bulked up and made almost pointy, the arms extended out from the thinned body, a gap in one armpit almost as clumsy as the one at the crotch.

My eyesight is shit but I can do better than that.

After the eraser ...

wand, select, select inverse, soften edges

I use paths for all my masking.

A high-volume production environment helps create these abominations.

for the win.

Seriously.

The models or celebrities (mostly women) almost always look like aliens.

How common "fashion photography" are photoshopped

Before Photoshop it was airbrushes and other tricks.

The master film photographers relied on lighting, exposure, film and print chemistry to maximize desirable textures and minimize undesirable textures. Not many do that any more.

Annie Leibovitz is a famous celebrity photographer, look here how a Vogue cover of hers was 'shopped:

http://jezebel.com/here-are-the-unretouched-images-from-lena-dunhams-vogu-1503336657

When they first started, it was to remove a zit or mole, counteract bad lighting or the shadow of the gofer bringing in the sandwiches or other flaws that can mar any good picture.

Now they want to make them look like Barbie dolls and the result is universally grotesque even when they do it correctly.

Fashion photography is about perfection according to some arbitrary ideal. These days the ideal is an out of proportion plastic doll.

or smoothing makeup and wrinkles and spots, but carving into a model body?

Interestingly, when I searched about this concept, I found an article in Cosmopolitan, of all places, warning about "thigh gap," including this

True, when you search for “thigh gap” or “thinspo” on Tumblr, you get a pop-up ad for their eating disorder counseling page,

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/celebrity/news/stop-thigh-gap

Everyone knows it's less expensive to hire a cheap model who can't pose and who doesn't look good, a photographer who can't shoot and a makeup artist who still thinks it's 1972 and keep them on set for days on end trying to get something that kinda resembles your product then spend double that on a Photoshop guy to attempt to repair the damage, than to hire good talent and put the pictures directly in the book.

They could get models of all shapes and sizes who are excellent at modeling, and good photographers, but advertisers want a "look" that isn't real.

Instead of actual people who actually model, and actual photographers who can actually take great photos of anyone, we get models (even in the top venues) who almost have the fantasy look who are then photoshopped into alien unreality and mediocre photographers who don't bother to "see" their models in the best light.

Models who don't have a fantasy shape don't get work. That's how it all goes wrong, that's how we get perfectly good looking people feeling insecure about themselves. And I guess that's the basic way our consumer society sells stuff, by convincing perfectly good looking people, which is most everyone, that they have to buy more stuff to make themselves feel better.

Well said, hunter.

Or so it seems that way to me. She looks like an AA, yet her body looks as though she has been at a tanning salon.

The face has a lot more angles and surfaces than say, the abdomen, so it's really easy to botch a recolor there, getting all the tones and variants right.

Given that they apparently used a nine-pixel pencil eraser tool to remove her labia from the universe, installed a folding ashtray on her hip, and transplanted the arm of a shaved tree sloth to her left side, I'm actually surprised they didn't try to mess with her face, honestly

Pathetic attempt at social engineering.

Is this a new trend or something? Why would anyone care?

In humans, a thigh gap is a gap between the thighs when standing upright with both knees touching.[1] Some women aspire to this for reasons of a perceived increase in attractiveness, with some considering it a sign of femininity and fragility[2] and some go as far as to say it symbolizes "the ideal body shape".[3] According to The Times of India, few women are able to form thigh gaps naturally and attempts to develop one typically involve unhealthy diets

he phrase and subject became a topic of widespread news coverage in December 2012 after the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.[4][speculation?] As a result, hundreds of blogs, Twitter accounts and memes in the West were created,[1] and images of thigh gaps featured in "thinspiration" blogs.[5] and images of thigh gaps started appearing across social networking sites.[6] Reportedly, some teenage girls have taken the view that the bigger the gap, the more beautiful the girl[7] and have resorted to starving themselves in order to obtain it.[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thigh_gap

Most people don't have that naturally, and it's an odd thing to aspire for. It seems like we're always coming up with new ways to try and make teenage girls kill themselves.

Every closeup of that travesty I've seen over the past many days has shown this: in the photo her crotch/pudenda/feminine delta has been excised with an X-Acto Knife.

Ewwwwwwww.

Apparently a model isn't "attractive" (to advertisers) without the triangular (Or in this case, square) gap created below the crotch by a combination of wide hips and skinny thighs:

It has since apparently become fashionable - you can look up all sorts of way to fast and tone to create a breeze tunnel for your vulva.

Something to keep in mind next time someone claims fashion magazines and other advertising don't have any impact on body image

Now that I recall, that CEO - that finally had to resign - claimed that not every woman can wear his hyper expensive crap, because their thighs rub against each other. The way most women's do.

That's just creepy. She looks like some misshapen freak with those stretched out arms and chopped up body parts.

and had an incompetent or a malicious photoshopper.