Fiona Xie

Wow, I just realised that my last posting was from Feb 2010, at around Chinese New Year. Whew, I had no idea that my self-imposed hiatus was so long :)

It was good to take a break. Though I enjoy retouching immensely, too much of a good thing can burn you out. After all, a hobby should be a fun thing, right?

So here's a Fiona Xie flood to announce my return. I had a good stash of Fiona Xie pics from her various magazine appearances. So she will be featured in the scans that I will be releasing in the coming weeks. As usual, you can grab the full sized scans over at my google groups.

Fiona was the hot stuff over at Mediacorp (in more ways than one) and just about the wet dream of most hot-blooded young guys LOL. Then she suddenly quit showbiz and scooted over to Hong Kong with no explanation given. All kinds of tawdry rumours inevitably circulated, given the suddenness and mysterious nature of her quitting: some say she got pregnant, others say she snookered herself a fabulously rich dude. Whatever. She still hosts programs occasionally, though, so she hasn't totally dropped from sight.

Happy Lunar New Year 2010!

A very happy Year of The Tiger to all! May prosperity, good health and happiness befall on everyone!

Yeah, I know I have not been releasing scans, but ya know, being married does make a good excuse, right? LOL.

Seriously, last year was pretty tumultuous. I sure hope this year would be calmer, but knowing the tiger, I'm not holding my breath :)

Pamela Anderson

This is Pamela Anderson, probably fresh from Canada and looking absolutely gorgeous. If what I read what was printed in her Playboy write-up right, she was only 18 years old when she posed for that august publication (February 1990).

Now there’s one thing I just don’t get. Take a look at this pic and compare with her recent photos. I could barely recognise the younger Pamela Anderson. Discounting the obvious age gap, I see absolutely nothing wrong with her body. She has a great figure, nice boobs, and an attractive face. Why she would want to go for surgical “enhancements” is quite beyond me. I felt she looked a lot worse after those procedures. Ugh.

Oh well, at least now we get to see Ms Anderson “in her prime”, so to speak. And she looked damned good!

This scan is released under my dScans WWSA series. As usual, you can grab the full-sized scan here. Now, this scan contains nudity, so those who are of a more delicate constitution consider yourselves duly warned.

For most folks, this lovely lady should be a familiar sight. She’s the featured model for a “bust enhancing” company in ads that run almost everyday in the free Today newspaper. Those full page ads are kinda hard to miss (for guys anyway).

She’s named Yako Rata (occasionally spelled Yaku Rata), an “international Japanese model”. She must also keep a fairly low profile, because my Internet searches on her pretty much turned up zilch. Or maybe she has an exclusive contract with this company :) Anyway, it’s good that they are not simply recycling the same few pictures in all the ads that featured her. The recent ones have her in a different hairstyle – I liked her much better with her hair down.

I think she’s hot, and she caught my eye the first time I saw her ad. Those dangerously low-cut dresses that she always wore in the ads most definitely helped . They more than highlight her bountiful assets :)

She’s definitely does not have that cutesy innocent look that seemed to be stereotypical of Japanese models. She has that kind of mature, smoldering sensuality that reminded me of Monica Belluci (now, THAT is a woman!).

Unfortunately, her ads do not seem to appear in any print media other than newspapers. So I had to make do with this full-page newspaper ad. And because of the low quality of the source material, I had to do a fair bit of work on it. If you guys know of any higher quality source, please do drop me a line :)

This scan of Yako Rata is released under my dScans WWSA series. As usual, you can grab the full-sized image here:

Her name is Xiao. That’s it. Short and sweet. And I think she’s pretty hot looking, though I’m not too sure about that slightly pouty look she has in all her shots.

Xiao also did a photoshoot for Newman magazine a few years ago with where she posed in her birthday suit with only a painted swimsuit covering her important lady bits. Now that was a smoking hot photoshoot. It certainly was different. I’ll have to get that scanned sometime.

I released 2 scans of Xiao for my dScans WWSA series. They are both double page spreads, so I had to join them up in Photoshop.

For the longest time, I was afraid to retouch double page scans. The trick, of course, was to merge the image seamlessly, or you’ll end up with an ugly line running through the middle of the scan. You also have to cut the pages out of the magazine. That usually involves splitting open the spine of the magazine and pretty much destroying the magazine in the process. And more often than not, you’ll still end up with missing bits, so that the 2 pages don’t exactly line up. That’s where the fun begins…you’ll have to do tons of cloning to “fill-in” those missing bits. Sigh, why can’t they just print it in landscape in the magazine and be done with it?

As usual, grab the full sized scans here:

Laurie Carr

I scanned this picture of the gorgeous Laurie Carr from a Playboy magazine about 10 years ago. Not too sure if I’ve ever released it, but I remembered that the scan was pretty small.

This was mainly due to 2 reasons:

Firstly, the abysmal quality of the print. Now, I’ve scanned plenty of images from magazines in my time, and I reckon that American magazines have just about the worst print quality. Tissue paper thin pages and half-tone patterns the size of golf balls, it takes A LOT of work to make the images look halfway decent. Playboy is by no means the worst offender, but they’re up there. Anyway, one of the tricks to improve quality is to down-sample your image, i.e. make your image smaller. If you scrunch your image small enough, even the lousiest retouch can look good. It’s sorta like how a low bit-rate movie file can look pretty good on your portable PMP but looks like crap on your PC monitor. :)

Secondly, big monitors were a rarity back then. After all, it made no sense of scan something larger than what your monitor can display, right?

And there’s another reason I didn’t mention….my skillz weren’t very good then, so that was the best I could do. Larger images really highlight any deficiencies in your retouching, and can be distracting (in a bad way).

Anyway, I hope that I’ve improved some since then. :)

This scan of Laurie Carr is released under my dScans WWSA series. And yeah, it contains tasteful nudity. So for those of you who are offended by this kind of stuff, consider yourself duly warned.

Grab the scan here.

Stacy Yang

I got this hand-me-down issue of Torque magazine from a buddy recently. For those unfamiliar with the magazine, Torque deals with everything that is even remotely automotive related. I’m not a car fan, so this magazine usually goes under my radar. What I do like, though, is that there is usually a scantily clad cutie that accompanies the cover story. And those ladies are usually pretty hot looking, too. Pretty girls and expensive cars seem to go hand in hand. They sure know what guys like, heh.

This kinda made me wonder why the local editions of Maxim (now defunct) and FHM do not plump Torque’s sources. The girls are hot and seemed to be local models, judging from the write up inside.

All the pictures inside were 2 page spreads, and all of them have way too much text crowding the image. I had to do a whole lot of cloning to hide the seams and get rid of the text. The one saving grace was that the print was of fairly high quality, even though the paper was kinda thin. Other than text and seam removal, it was a pretty simple retouch. I left the background plain to make the subject matter stand out. Compared to American magazines, local magazines are a cinch to retouch. The half-tone pattern used in American printing are the size of golf balls! They need a LOT of retouching to make them look half-way decent.

Although I named the scan Stacy Yang, it’s by no means certain that this was actually her name. The model was, unfortunately, uncredited in the photo-shoot. They seemed more interested in mentioning the sponsors of her clothing, the photographer and the make-up artist than the model name. Shucks. I got the name from a one-line blurb in the article. What the hell, I’ll just use the name Stacy Yang rather than leave her anonymous. If anybody knows her name, do feel free to drop me a line :)

I have released 3 scans of Stacy and that what’s-its-name car for my dScans WWSA series. As usual, you can grab the full sized scans here.