Retouching Introduction

This is an intro­duc­tion to the retouch­ing meth­ods I use within Pho­to­shop, don’t take this as gospel as my meth­ods and tech­niques do change as I explore the hid­den fea­tures of Pho­to­shop. Instead use these tuto­ri­als as a map towards your own styles and tech­niques. I use Masks and Chan­nels exten­sively to shape and mould the images and many of the tech­niques I use and will be show­ing are advanced in nature. How­ever don’t be dis­heart­ened as all tech­niques can be learnt with practice.

Before an image goes near your image edit­ing pro­gram there is sev­eral fac­tors to consider:

• The pur­pose of the ses­sion. Is it for a mag­a­zine, a client, or a per­sonal shot?
• Intended audi­ence. Again sim­i­lar to the above but with the view how it’s going to be displayed.
• If shoot­ing for a client how much work do they want done? Do they want a full makeover or some­thing more subtle?
• Image clean up. The most basic of the post pro­cess­ing steps, remov­ing stray hairs, and retouch­ing makeup.

There are other areas but these are my con­sid­er­a­tions when I start choos­ing and out­putting images. In all cases I will step back from the images and con­sider what work is both appro­pri­ate and also required. When I approach a ses­sion I will have a dis­tinct set of ideas or images I want to cre­ate. This can be called story board­ing, and is com­mon in the media indus­try. Many pho­tog­ra­phers don’t approach a ses­sion with a plan and this can lead to headaches in post.

The first stage of retouch­ing is what I call details. This is pri­mar­ily done in RAW and cov­ers colour, white bal­ance, detail sharp­en­ing. At this stage I rarely add much con­trast or enhance the colour within the image as I pre­fer to do these within Pho­to­shop where I can cre­ate masks to selec­tively place where I want con­trast or colour. The white bal­ance is done with a WhiBal card espe­cially in mixed or dif­fi­cult light­ing con­di­tions I might then tweak this fur­ther for a more pleas­ing result to give the image a bit more warmth. The final aspect is to do cap­turel sharp­en­ing to counter the AA fil­ter that’s inher­ent in dSLRs. Cap­ture sharp­en­ing, isn’t about sharp­en­ing the image it’s about doing just enough sharp­en­ing required to remove the haze that you will find in RAW files.

I then bring the image into Pho­to­shop and start the sec­ond stage of edit­ing. These will be the first of my foun­da­tion groups. This is where I will cre­ate a new group to do colour enhance­ment, con­trast and focus areas. Colour enhance­ment also cov­ers any colour cor­rec­tion that the white bal­ance step may have intro­duced. This step is pri­mar­ily to enhance or improve the skin colour. Con­trast is to give the image a bit of pres­ence; this is gen­er­ally a sub­tle layer as much of the post pro­cess­ing steps will add to this. The final layer is to cre­ate focus areas this layer is a sim­ple dodge/burn layer where I paint in the rel­e­vant areas to cre­ate focus points for exam­ple this could be to darken the back­ground, to enhance shad­ows or to lighten the skin.

At each major stage of the work­flow I will cre­ate a group, this organ­ises the var­i­ous lay­ers cre­ated by the work­flow into some­thing more man­age­able. Once each sec­tion is com­pleted I will col­lapse the layer to reduce clut­ter. This is impor­tant as often end up with 15 + lay­ers in an image.

The next group of lay­ers is the enhance­ment group for the skin and body. This is the area that many new­com­ers to photo edit­ing want to do and get wrong. There is no one step fix. Retouch­ing images is all about expe­ri­ence, under­stand­ing the tools you have and also study­ing the human form. It’s also all about patience, just as there is no one stop fix there is no real short­cuts to make the task faster. The only short cut you can take is when you cap­ture the image (light­ing and a make up artist). Also another impor­tant point to remem­ber is that there is no sin­gle tech­nique that will work for every image you work on. Whilst the same tech­nique works for the sim­i­lar images in a ses­sion it may not work for the next ses­sion. The tools and tech­niques I use most heav­ily use in retouch­ing is:

• Dodge and burn layers
• Heal­ing and Clone tools
• Smart Sharpen
• Lasso tool
• His­tory brush
• Curves

I will rarely use any blur fil­ters in my pro­cess­ing on the main image. Blur­ring will destroy the tex­ture you’re try­ing to enhance it also destroys much of the sharp­ness around the skin. Yes that’s right you’re try­ing to enhance the sub­ject and remove imper­fec­tions, not destroy skin tex­ture to make them look like a plas­tic doll. The key bit of infor­ma­tion you need to remem­ber in retouch­ing skin is to avoid pat­terns. Noth­ing gives away a retouched image more than pat­terns on the skin. Skin pores, shading/colour and wrin­kles all form the char­ac­ter of the face. If you have a series of pores all the same size then it screams look at me if you study the make up of human skin around the face you will see pores vary in shape, size and depth. This applies also to small areas of skin. Wrin­kles also help build a face and the removal would cre­ate a fake and almost unrecog­nis­able image of that person.

So once I have an image of a per­son I gen­er­ally remove obvi­ous imper­fec­tions like blem­ishes and stray hair, but moles, freck­les I gen­er­ally leave alone unless the client states oth­er­wise or doesn’t add to the story (pure glam­our or fash­ion). Facial hair can also be removed but this is often tricky with dark haired mod­els. Another area is shad­ows and high­lights. These are use­ful for defin­ing facial struc­ture and should be used to accent the mod­els strongest fea­tures and to reduce the ones we don’t want. Note we aren’t remov­ing them but mak­ing them less obvi­ous to the viewer. The human eye is attracted to areas of con­trast and by reduc­ing the areas we can focus the eyes on what we want.

On a final note much of my work­flow is depen­dant on a Wacom tablet for the pen tool. It’s one of the biggest time savers out of all my kit and hav­ing the sen­si­tiv­ity of the nib to cre­ate masks can­not be under­stated. Whilst Wacom is the best there are other man­u­fac­tur­ers who do rea­son­ably priced kit if your bud­get can’t stretch to the Wacom tablets.

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