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General Photography
Portrait
Stephanie : Commercial & Glamour Head Shot
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<blockquote data-quote="Robert Mitchell" data-source="post: 102870" data-attributes="member: 11282"><p>Rick and Jack,</p><p></p><p>All good retouching (subjective, I know) is based on Dodge & Burn in one form or another. When I was learning how to retouch I watched all the YouTube videos and read articles, blogs and tutorials but never found the types of techniques that separate ok and mediocre from excellent and what is termed 'high end' retouching.</p><p></p><p>Most of what you find floating around the internet involves skin smoothing and no good retoucher uses skin smoothing techniques. They're terrible and make a big sloppy, mushy pixel mess.</p><p></p><p>Some of the plugins and applications like Portrait Professional and Portraiture do a few things very well but I find them to only be useful in the finishing of an image, used on a separate layer with the opacity reduced significantly. I would never pump am image through Portrait Professional and call it a day.</p><p></p><p>The down side of doing high end retouching is that it's time consuming and requires a lot of patience. It's certainly not for wedding or event work where you're finishing hundreds of images, but in the world of glamour, beauty, and fashion, it's a must.</p><p></p><p>OK, on to the method..</p><p></p><p>While this may seem unclear and complicated, it's the simplest way to describe my process of retouching an image.</p><p></p><p>1- Open image in Photoshop. Duplicate background layer, create 50% gray fill layer using Soft Light blending mode at top of stack, create high contrast Black and White adjustment layer at top of stack.</p><p>2- Use Patch and Spot Healing Brush tool to clean up coarse skin texture and stray hairs. </p><p>3- Paint with black and white on gray layer using soft brush with low opacity to Dodge and Burn the skin so that deep lines or hard shadows are lifted by dodging and white or raised patches are burned to even out skin tones. Too much dodge and burn equalizes everything and no longer looks natural or like skin. The black and white adjustment layer is used when doing D&B to help see contrast and because this process looks at luminance and not color. All color adjustment and correction is done after D&B is complete.</p><p>4- Adjust color, saturation and any skin color that needs tweaking.</p><p>5- Eyes, teeth, lips, etc are adjusted for brightness, saturation, contrast.</p><p>6- High pass sharpening is applied where needed.</p><p></p><p>If you guys have any questions or want clarification just let me know.</p><p></p><p>EDIT: Sorry but I don't post 'before' shots.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Robert Mitchell, post: 102870, member: 11282"] Rick and Jack, All good retouching (subjective, I know) is based on Dodge & Burn in one form or another. When I was learning how to retouch I watched all the YouTube videos and read articles, blogs and tutorials but never found the types of techniques that separate ok and mediocre from excellent and what is termed 'high end' retouching. Most of what you find floating around the internet involves skin smoothing and no good retoucher uses skin smoothing techniques. They're terrible and make a big sloppy, mushy pixel mess. Some of the plugins and applications like Portrait Professional and Portraiture do a few things very well but I find them to only be useful in the finishing of an image, used on a separate layer with the opacity reduced significantly. I would never pump am image through Portrait Professional and call it a day. The down side of doing high end retouching is that it's time consuming and requires a lot of patience. It's certainly not for wedding or event work where you're finishing hundreds of images, but in the world of glamour, beauty, and fashion, it's a must. OK, on to the method.. While this may seem unclear and complicated, it's the simplest way to describe my process of retouching an image. 1- Open image in Photoshop. Duplicate background layer, create 50% gray fill layer using Soft Light blending mode at top of stack, create high contrast Black and White adjustment layer at top of stack. 2- Use Patch and Spot Healing Brush tool to clean up coarse skin texture and stray hairs. 3- Paint with black and white on gray layer using soft brush with low opacity to Dodge and Burn the skin so that deep lines or hard shadows are lifted by dodging and white or raised patches are burned to even out skin tones. Too much dodge and burn equalizes everything and no longer looks natural or like skin. The black and white adjustment layer is used when doing D&B to help see contrast and because this process looks at luminance and not color. All color adjustment and correction is done after D&B is complete. 4- Adjust color, saturation and any skin color that needs tweaking. 5- Eyes, teeth, lips, etc are adjusted for brightness, saturation, contrast. 6- High pass sharpening is applied where needed. If you guys have any questions or want clarification just let me know. EDIT: Sorry but I don't post 'before' shots. [/QUOTE]
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