1 Commercial Photography Retouching Basics: An Introduction to Editing Photos Copyright © Texas Education Agency, 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 artisticeye, 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. Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission. 2

3 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, 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, 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. Todays lesson will be showing methods of retouching on people even though these methods can be used on other photographs. 5Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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. 6Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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. 7Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Image Example To demonstrate retouching, we will be using the significantly flawed image to the right to retouch. 8Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Adjusting the Brightness The many possibilities of adjusting the brightness of any given photo include: adjustment layers, curves, brightness/contrast sliders, utilize camera RAW. 9Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Difference After Brightness Change 10Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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. 11Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Spot Healing Example Notice: The right image is missing the blemishes. The left image shows prevalent moles Background has been blacked out 12Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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. 13Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

More with Liquify With a liquify filter, one can move the jaw line, adjust eye placement, and make the bottom of the models face smaller and more symmetrical. Never make overly obvious changes in a liquify filter because then people start to look like aliens. 14Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Notice the Differences 15 Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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 models 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. 16Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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. 17Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Before/After 18Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Cleaning up Hot Spots Hot spots are shiny areas on a subjects 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. 19Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Hot Spot Example 20 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, 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. 21Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

Finished Hot Spot When completed, the image should look like the one on the far right and be hot spot free. 22Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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. 23Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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 Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission. 24

Finalized Version Comparison 25Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.

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 someones face? 26Copyright © Texas Education Agency, All rights reserved. Images and other multimedia content used with permission.