The human body is a battleground, and the arena of conflict is your favorite magazine.

Enter ESPN mag's "Body Issue," released in October and featuring photos of nude athletes.

With expert lighting, makeup, and a light dusting of Photoshop, these bodies are shown at their best. But in a twist, they are not super-Photoshopped - no use of a computer program to slim, twist, or wrest them out of shape so that someone everyone recognizes becomes almost unrecognizable.

Sure, the ESPN editors have taken what's real and cleaned it up - but they haven't made it up.

In resisting the addiction to image-manipulation, and in letting bodies be bodies, ESPN magazine joins a mild but definite trend: away from "perfection" and toward authenticity and diversity.

So while the majority of media still cater to the magic of computers, the voices calling for "unretouched" are getting louder.

"Whoever she is, she looks great!" So singer Kelly Clarkson blogged when she saw a ludicrously skinny-fied photo of herself on the September cover of Self. "They have definitely Photoshopped the crap out of me," she wrote.

To Photoshop - it's now a verb, as omnipresent as the practice itself. Ever since computer manipulation of images became widespread in the late 1980s, the practice has drawn controversy and horselaughs - as when Oprah Winfrey's head landed on someone else's bod for a 1989 TV Guide cover.

Now there's an entire blog cottage industry sprouting around Photoshop tiffs, exposing and ridiculing sore-thumb extremes: tennis star Andy Roddick's head joined to a bull-necked, ripped torso on a disastrous cover of Men's Fitness of June/July 2007; Kate Winslet's womanly torso rocket-slimmed and fused to 6-foot legs in a February 2003 GQ cover so bad that Winslet complained publicly; Clarkson, Reese Witherspoon, and Jessica Simpson made into dolls or stick figures, in magazine after magazine.

"Heartless retouching," fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh has called it.

Dove produced an "Artificial Beauty Time Lapse," viewable on YouTube (go.philly.com/dove), in which a pretty model is first made up, then airbrushed, then, via Photoshop, turned into a billboard apparition.

After country star Faith Hill was reduced to a spectral wraith for the July 2007 Redbook cover, several Web sites pounced. Anna Wahrman of the After Ellen blog compared the "before" photo with the Photoshopped cover (go.philly.com/faithhill2), and a hilarious deconstruction appeared on the Web site Jezebel (go.philly.com/faithhill3), dissecting, point by point, just what was Photoshopped: an arm added; elbow, shoulder, back and clavicle cruelly chopped; a woman torqued.

An authenticity movement? Those calling for authenticity want pictures of people to look like the people pictured. While few would object to erasing a zit or a pit here or there, unease grows with the degree of "correction."

Liz Canner, a documentary filmmaker whose Orgasm Inc., on manipulation of women in the drug and ad industries, is touring the film festivals, says, "No doubt there's pleasure to be derived from fashion fantasy. . . . But we also need to see the reality of women's bodies and lives, not standards that can never be attained."

Fashion photographers say retouching is their job - but there's a limit. Philadelphia fashion photographer Whitney Thomas says, "I'm a fan of retouching to some extent. I want my subject to look their best, which means you want to take out flaws, blemishes, a little love-handle action here and there. I get off the bus, though, when you start getting into the extreme, and changing a person from what they are into something they're not."

Lansdale fashion photographer Stephen Hudgins agrees: "I don't do computer manipulations of photos, other than taking pimples off of faces."

(According to The Inquirer's policy manual, the paper does not alter photographs, either by adding or subtracting elements within images. Photographs may be cropped, scaled, lightened, or darkened as necessary for newspaper reproduction, or corrected for technical defects such as dust spots.)

Hudgins also says a talented photographer knows how to make a model look best with posing and lighting.

Some magazines are seeing the light, too.

The April issue of the French magazine Elle featured eight models photographed without makeup. "Stars sans fards," "Stars without artifice," the cover read. "Sans maquillage," without makeup, "sans retouches," without retouching. There followed photos of fashion stars such as Monica Bellucci, Eva Herzigova, and Sophie Marceau.

In fact, not retouching has, in contrarian fashion, become fashionable. Call it "unretouched chic." A prime example is the unadorned, raw fashion pictures of German photographer Juergen Teller, or People magazine's yearly "World's Most Beautiful People" issue, which has included photos of everyone from Drew Barrymore to Rihanna without makeup, and a few (George Clooney) who haven't suffered under the computer's knife. To some extent, magazines can sell copies because buyers are interested in uncooked images showing how people really look.

If the word unretouched has become fashionable, we may have Kim Kardashian to thank. The April/May issue of Complex featured an improbably slim Kardashian on the cover. But the magazine goofed and put the unretouched version on its Web site. The cover image had been madly Photoshopped. Stung, the curvy Kardashian put on a bikini and did a much-touted "100% Unretouched" cover shoot for Life & Style. Headline: "I have cellulite, so what?"

The fantasy defense. Here's the case for the defense: Fashion photography concerns fantasy, not reality, and models, editors, and clothes designers are entitled to present ideal versions of themselves and their work to the public - which wants that ideal, that fantasy.

Donna Reamy, associate chair of the department of fashion design and merchandising at Virginia Commonwealth University, is not a defender but says defenders have something of a point. She writes by e-mail that "magazine covers are designed to sell magazines" and that it's consumers who "create a buzz about what's on the covers of magazines no matter what the body type."

The fantasy defense can get downright shrill. Designer Karl Lagerfeld recently told the German magazine Focus that "no one wants to see round women" and that the fashion industry presents "dreams and illusions." He called women who criticize the skinny ideal "fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the TV."

The ultimate fantasy defense came in September from Lucy Danziger, editor in chief of Self. When the skinny Clarkson cover shot drew fire, Danziger blogged, "Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her best. . . . But in the sense that Kelly is the picture of confidence, and she truly is, then I think this photo is the truest we have ever put out there on the newsstand." There it is: We Photoshop to inspire young women.

So what should happen? It's unlikely that photo manipulation per se could ever be banned outright. "Hey, we're the Wild West in this country," says photographer Thomas. "If people are waiting for a law against it, they're going to wait a long time."

Simpler measures call for magazines to credit retouchers and photo artists prominently - a proposal most magazines are resisting.

Or we could all just remain on our sides of the Photoshopping fence. Those who like fantasy can get it. Those who don't like fakery can protest, making people aware of extreme Photoshopping and possibly changing a few minds and magazine covers.

Canner wants to see real women, and she believes real women do, too: "Why not present the wide variety of what women can look like - show that women are beautiful in all shapes and sizes?"

Contact John Timpane at 215-854-4406, jt@phillynews.com, or twitter.com/jtimpane.