Photo Restoration Blog

Posts Tagged ‘photo retouching’

It been a while since i showed some of my other work besides photo restoration. So Ive decided to show a piece i did i called organic glasshouse.

photo retouching for adverts

You may be interested to see the process behind this image, its quite simple but very effective. these are the three images i used

Photo retouching for advertising Step 1

Base leaf structure. I  used a copy of the image and used  glowing edges and inverted the image. Then merged it with the original and set the blending mode to difference

Photo retouching for adverts step 1

Photo retouching for advertisements step 2

This image was then merged with a tomato plant to get the final result. I added some text and the final result is at the top.!

Photo retouching and famous people in the media.

Dawn French in Soho hailing a cab 1991

When famous faces are everywhere in the media and on TV the pressure to look good with flawless skin is immense. Their faces are their income. If their face fails to look good then they don’t feel good about going on television or to media events. Its this pressure that leads to surgery and heavy photo retouching  where photo are used in the press and promotional material. There are some celebrities that don’t appear to have had any surgical procedures or work done, take Dawn French seen here in Soho in 1991. I took this photo when on a photo shoot in London. Its was taken candid, and spur of the moment, shot from the hip and in a cab before I could wind on the frame and shoot another. Dawn, although gained weight these days, is clearly happy the way she is and they way she looks. I can see it from both sides, get the best flawless face that seems to stay the same no matter how many years pass, so the image of you remains stable for as long as possible, or build up your character  and everyone remembers you for who you are and not necessarily what you look like without the need for copious amounts of photo retouching.

Choose to be in the media and you will end up on magazines and you will then get judged they way you look and be pressurised  to look thinner or younger. Or let it ride and just be who you are and let your character be remembered rather than your image and how much surgery or photo retouching you have had.

What do you think?

Thoughts on photo retouching

Photo restoration can encompass a wide range of photo retouching tasks. I find myself performing all kinds of tweaks to images that aren’t restoration at all. For example removing people from a photo or adding them in, manufacturing a background or slimming someone down, or adding a new sky.  It is these tasks that fit into the photo retouching or manipulation category.

Photo retouching for me is about isolating objects and retouching skin or retouching models, cleaning up creases in clothes and making the whole image scan better. This is very much like the “polish” on the final image. The photographer would have already thought about the way the lines flow around the image and where your eye ends up, hopefully right where the product or action is happening. Photo retouching would be to clean up this path the eye travels so there is a smooth path to the selling point of the image. Small glints of light catching untidily on metal or plastic, skin or props can be cleaned away, shadows that fall too heavily or hide details can be corrected and slowly the image becomes a work of two artists, the photographer and the photo retoucher.

Photo retouching can also encompass reducing grain or cutting out objects, compositing together for an advertising image. The photo restoration artist may find their skills being put to the test in all aspects of digital wizardry and photo retouching will be just one of them.

In a photo retouch of a studio shot, model photo you may have to, retouch and even out skin tone, trim down some curves, remove tattoos, ear rings or jewelery, smooth clothes or hem lines or hair lines, remove stray hairs, sculpt wonky eye brows , even out teeth, apply makeup, highlight hair, change skin colour, in some case lengthen legs or change the colour of clothing or hair. Others may be to add moles or change eye colour, texture or high lights. If you can think it most likely it has been done.

Next time when you see a photo and say its “had some photo retouching done on that” like it was simple and people do it all the time and anyone with a computer can do that. It is partly true, many people with computers and a photo manipulation package can edit a photo. The difference with the professionals it is the quality of the work and how it is carried out and the meticulous attention to detail that photo retouching experts put  into their work that make them stand out from the many that simply use the clone tool to swap their head onto the body of a celebrity.