1 Commercial Photography Retouching Basics: An Introduction to Editing Photos Copyright © Texas...

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Commercial Photography

Retouching Basics:

An Introduction to Editing Photos

Copyright © Texas Education Agency, 2012. All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Introduction Many things are required to create a good

picture: Technical proficiency with a camera, an artistic

“eye”, a nice camera, good lighting, and much more.

Retouching is necessary to improve photos. There is no such thing as a perfect photo.

For this reason, it is important to know how to retouch photos.


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Some Uses of Photo Retouching To improve personal photos To edit professional photos To edit photos for continuity within a project

3Copyright © Texas Education Agency, 2012.. All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Retouching When working on a high profile production,

where an image will be seen by the world, it is important to make people in your photo look their best.

This is where retouching comes into play.

4Copyright © Texas Education Agency, 2012. All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

What is “Retouching?”

Retouching is the art of digitally editing a photograph to make slight repairs/alterations.

Almost any image has some amount of retouching work done on it.

Retouching can be done to photos of people, landscapes, or product shots.

Today’s lesson will be showing methods of retouching on people even though these methods can be used on other photographs.


Image Editing Program There are many different digital image editing

programs that may be used. Choose an industry standard program that works well for you.

You will find that many digital editing software programs have common aspects and many of the methods are the same across software applications.


Workflow

The order in which you choose to retouch your photo (sharpen before liquify, etc…) is called your “workflow”.

Note that while doing retouches working in a specific order is best. This order might not be best for you or your photo and you may choose to go about your retouching in a different fashion.


Image Example

To demonstrate retouching, we will be using the significantly flawed image to the right to retouch.


Adjusting the Brightness

The many possibilities of adjusting the brightness of any given photo include:

adjustment layers, curves, brightness/contrast sliders, utilize camera RAW.


Difference After Brightness Change


Blemishes/Spot Healing Brush

Every face has any number of blemishes that should be removed through retouching.

Using a brush tool is the easiest way to remove blemishes.

This tool allows the area to be repaired. Make sure the brush size is slightly larger

than the targeted area and simply clicking on it.


Spot Healing ExampleNotice: The right image

is missing the blemishes.

The left image shows prevalent moles

Background has been blacked out


Liquify Filter

People usually are not satisfied with the way a face naturally looks. Therefore, most images of models appearing in

magazines are first run through a liquify filter before being printed.

A liquify filter is powerful and useful.


More with Liquify

With a liquify filter, one can move the jaw line, adjust eye placement, and make the bottom of the model’s face smaller and more symmetrical.

Never make overly obvious changes in a liquify filter because then people start to look like aliens.


Notice the Differences

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Retouching Eyes

Eyes are always a very important part of the photo and are often the focal point of a portrait.

It is important to sharpen and brighten the model’s eyes to make sure they look their best.

These same techniques can be used on the focal point of non-human objects in other photos as well.


Retouching Eyes

Use a sharpening tool around the eyes to make sure every aspect is sharpened. Twice around the eyes is sufficient.

After sharpening, use a dodging tool to brighten the eyes. Make sure to knock the exposure down to 10% in the

context menu and paint until satisfied with the brightness.


Before/After


Cleaning up “Hot Spots”

Hot spots are shiny areas on a subject’s face which are caused by a flash reflecting off the surface or by uneven lighting.

Hot spots tend to make people look sweating or greasy, neither of which are very appealing.

There are many possible ways to fix this issue: one way is to “clone” other parts of the photo.


Hot Spot Example

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• Notice the bright area on the forehead and in between the eyebrows?

• This is an example of a hot spot that needs retouching. Copyright © Texas Education Agency, 2012. All rights reserved.

Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Hot Spot Example

Use a cloning tool on the selected area circled on the right, knock down the opacity of our brush, and then paint over the hot spot.


Finished Hot Spot

When completed, the image should look like the one on the far right and be hot spot free.


Advanced Retouching Techniques

Cropping the image Use a high pass filter to sharpen the image, A duplicated layer set to overlay blending

mode for some contrast De-saturate a selected color range using a

hue/saturation adjustment layer to get rid of some of the reds in the image.


Our Workflow Brightened the photo Used a brush tool to remove blemishes Used a liquify filter to rearrange parts of the

face Used a sharpening tool and a dodging tool to

sharpen and brighten the eyes Used cloning to remove hot spots around the

face


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Finalized Version Comparison


Review

What is a “workflow?” What are “hot spots?” Which tools would I use to retouch eyes? Which tool is the best to use to remove

blemishes? What would be best to adjust the shape of

someone’s face?


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