You figure it out

Sleek and elegant, she stretches out on a chaise longue in a pose which evokes the glamour of bygone Hollywood.

In a wispy cotton dress and with her long legs looking toned, Jennifer Lopez's beauty is there for all to see.

But this photograph - shot to promote the singer-actress's new fragrance - is so different from the one taken of the same woman on a Miami beach over the weekend.

J-Lo's tiny white bikini did not necessarily do her famous curves any favours as she pulled a wide-brimmed hat over her tousled wet hair and wrapped herself in a huge towel.

While the overall impression was still of a healthy young woman, it was a far cry from the polished image the singer-actress projects in the publicity pictures for Still perfume.

But any suggestion that the pictures might have been touched up were roundly denied yesterday. Photographer Nick Knight admitted spending two months on the project after 33-year-old Miss Lopez personally requested his presence behind the camera.

But he insisted he simply used an old-fashioned lighting technique to make the pictures more flattering - by smearing Vaseline on his camera lens.

'The campaign was based on early Hollywood photography and was a mix of modern and old technology,' he said. 'We shot it on a plate camera with bellows, and smeared Vaseline on the lens. That sent light pinging off in different directions: there's no digital equivalent to it.'

In the past Knight had admitted using parts of several photographs to create the perfect image - although he insists that is not the case with Miss Lopez.

Knight, who also photographs fashion shoots for Christian Dior, said: 'My Dior campaigns are constructed like a jigsaw - you take a bag from this transparency and an arm from that one and put it together to make the image. We didn't have to do so much of that for Jennifer.'

And the photographer and his team have nothing but praise for Miss Lopez - who is infamous for her outrageous demands. Knight said: 'She was very professional; she arrived early and worked hard.'

In the picture, Miss Lopez is wearing her £700,000 pink diamond engagement ring - which will look a little dated in the advertising campaign because her wedding to Ben Affleck was called off at the weekend.

The art of digital retouching has become more common on photoshoots over recent years.

When Kate Winslet appeared in the men's magazine GQ, artists made her legs longer and stomach flatter to make it appear as if she had lost a stone in weight.

Miss Winslet told the Daily Mail then: 'The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and more importantly I don't desire to look like that.'