The best looking photography you’ve seen has probably been handled by a retoucher. While we like to think that the camera picked up the perfect lighting, smoothed the look of wrinkles, and captured the beauty of a scene, it is rarely the case. I’ve done a significant amount of photo editing and retouching, including removing every kind of facial and body faux paus you can imagine. Recently, I did some contract work for a Seattle area company. I will use some of my work to demonstrate some things to look for when tasked with improving, editing, and retouching photography.
1. Determine the focus of the photograph. Enhance it when needed.
This photograph is intended to demonstrate how a product (the bag) might be used in a real-world setting. Many things in the photo distract from that focus. Several tools can be used to reduce or eliminate these distractions. Below are the steps I took to improve this example.
A. Simplify the color.
The orange sweater and flowers pulled the viewer’s eye away from the black bag and the woman carrying it. Unifying the color scheme into natural colors and green accents helps to draw the eye between the woman and bag, rather than stopping on the wild orange coloring.
B. Darken the corner of the sky.
The left upper corner was too light and empty, which became a dead zone. Adding a darkening gradient to the corner helps reactivate that space and bring the viewer’s eye back around into the photograph.
2. Enhance the focus item in the photograph when necessary.
The bag that was photographed was a sample, and therefore was lacking the proper supports that the end-product would include. The result was a bag collapsing on itself and unable to roll behind the user as the real product would. I was specifically asked to correct this. The process involved a significant amount of cloning, patching, burning/dodging regions, and creating a shadow to match the new shape.
3. Retouch skin, but don’t over do it.
I regularly see disasters in this area. I have retouched thousands of faces, and trust me when I say that people want to look better than they really do. However, if you’ve got a 40-something woman, they will have some wrinkles. Everyone will have some darkness under their eyes. The trick is knowing where to draw the line between idealized beauty and realism.
I love the patch tool on skin. It’s great for removing/reducing wrinkles and blemishes and also for reducing under eye bags. Take extra note to enlarged veins in the hands, especially on pale skinned people, and be sure to clone away stray hairs.
Often, however, that does not go far enough. In this example, the light source came from behind the woman, which caused her face to be in shadow. The result is a low contrast face and eyes with abnormal looking darkened skin. Adjustment layers and whitening/lighting the whites of the woman’s eyes goes a long way to bringing back her natural beauty.
Below is another example of a photo that I edited for the client.
While it is not the most glamorous photograph, this shot was intended to show the vast amount of storage that the “Space Maker” product would add to the stroller. Again, I removed the distracting elements and retouched/edited the woman as needed.
Lightened and color corrected skin. Removed house numbers from sidewalk. Removed branding from water bottle. Removed a few stray hairs. Reduced under eye wrinkle. Touched up arms.
Major problems in this photograph included the shadow from the photographer’s umbrella and the unhealthy brown patches in the grass. I corrected these and reduced the opacity of the “trend” hole in the woman’s jeans, since it was distracting.
