Unsolicited Advice

Unsolicited Advice

For the Stater Retoucher

3 major Things to take into account in retouching

* Not because you can do it means you should

* Not because it looks better means that it looks good

* Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken

When retouching an image, specially when it’s a portfolio image (testing) you make all the aesthetic decisions (or most of them), then you need to make the right ones.

To name an example… When you change the lipstick tone, you need a reason other than “I think it’s going to look better”.

Everything you do to a model should be to enhance composition, you don’t slim her down to slim her down but to make her fit better in the frame, make the shape more interesting, the same with clothing, eyes, arms or nose. When you change the lipstick/eyeshadow tones, you do it to take attention from them or drawn attention to them.

It’s very important to stay in touch with the full image. Most of the times I see retouches that focus on small details but forget about the full frame, you have perfect skin when close up, but the full frame looks blotchy, my advice is, every once in a while, zoom out to print size (or further) and look at the image, really look at the image.

These are 4 aspects I concider when retouching:

* Composition
* Tone
* Light/shadow
* Texture

Composition: Nothing stands out. If something calls the eyes too much, you remove it or blend it better with the rest of the frame. If you have half a shoe/light/leave/watteva you remove it, it’s either in the frame or out. If you have something in the frame that you can’t tell at first glance exactly what it is (some fur, piece of skin somewhere, accessories in weird angles, you remove it, hide it, cover it up - why? Because the brain likes it better when it’s clear if can’t tell what something is right away your brain “gets it” as wrong and the image becomes less attractive to the human eye.
Hair is part of the image too… Don’t forget to retouch the hair, it’s like half an image!
Remove, flying hairs, make texture smooth, D&B shadows and highlights to shape it… What ever it takes to make it congruent with the skin retouch,

Tone: You decide your final tones before even opening the image, once you have them, make them even.
The skintones shouldn’t be monotone, there’s natural variations in skin, but there shouldn’t be differences between face, hands, body
When doing beauty, eye bags have less saturation, shadows usually have more and those things need to be taken into consideration.

Light/Shadow: Unless it was meant to be harsh (And sometimes even then)
Transitions between shadow and light need to be smooth. This includes transitions like from neck to chest, cheekbone to cheek, nose to mouth - and - texture wise.

Texture: Texture is nothing more or less than local contrast in small ranges of skin.
Edges of contrast. Texture needs to be even, but always respecting the original patterns of skin. You don’t have the same texture in the forehead than u do in cheeks, nose, under eyes, chin, over lips, neck or body.
When working with the split (Frequencies or Inverted Highpass) you can’t just use ONE radius for the whole image, because you are only retaining ONE range of edges, just one kind of texture, ergo: IT WILL LOOK FAKE

Within the same line of thought… stay away from plug ins that use general radius on the whole face or you’ll end up with blotchy skin with “selective shine” like you spread wax on the models face forgetting about bigger inconsistencies between shadow and light.

Learn to look at the image a lot before doing anything, make good calls, have a base for your aesthetic decisions.

Only fix what calls the eye.
Don’t remove every pore, make the texture even but keeping the original pattern
Don’t remove all the peach fur, make it consistent.
Don’t remove every flying hair - just the ones going against the flow.