Project for Individual Study: Learn to Retouch

If you'll be taking many portraits, one thing you'll want to learn for sure is how to retouch your pictures digitally. Few people are so great looking that their photographs can be used as is with no modification. Do you really think Sharon Stone or Keanu Reeves look like that when they get up in the morning? Unless your subjects have Hollywood make-up artists at their beck and call, it's likely you'll need to optimize some of their physical features when you take the photos (perhaps using the lighting techniques described in this chapter), or do some work on their images later on.

Retouching photographs in Photoshop or another image editor is a lot of fun, not too difficult, and is certainly easier than when I started in photography and retouching artists were just that: artisan specialists skilled with brush and knife, who knew a bit of photographic chemistry that came in handy when bleaching or restoring colors.

The finished portrait shown earlier in this chapter didn't look like that originally. I performed quite a bit of fix up on the image, as you can see in the annotated version shown in Figure 6.34. It was actually quite common in the good old days to take a proof print and mark it up with a grease pencil, much like the representation in the figure. Today, we can mark up a digital copy and then go to work.

Figure 6.34. This original image has lots of things that need fixing.

Some things are easy to fix. In Figure 6.35, you can see the double catch lights in the young man's eyes. If you look closely, you can make out the shape of the photographic umbrellas used to expose the picture. Removing the extra catch lights was relatively easy. Lightening the hair, improving the complexion, and making the teeth whiter were a bit more work. You can find everything you need to know about retouching in my book Digital Retouching and Compositing: Photographers' Guide, available from Thomson Course Technology.

Figure 6.35. Some of the fixes are simple, such as removing the extra catch lights in the eyes.

If you'd like to get started, here's a list of the skills you'll need to sharpen:

• Using selection tools. Making selections is the best way to confine your corrections only to the parts of the image you actually want to modify. Image editors have a variety of selection tools that allow you to draw selections, select pixels based on their color or brightness, or even to "paint" a selection with a brush tool.
• Working with layers. Layers allow you to place different parts of the image on separate overlays so you can work with them individually. Need to correct the color of the eyes? It might be easiest to copy those features to a layer, make the changes you need, and then merge the eyes back when you're finished. With layers you can create several different versions of a change, make them visible or invisible, and use only the one you want.
• Sizing, cropping, and changing orientation. Many photos can be improved by resizing, cropping out extraneous material, or performing some rotation on all or part of the image.
• Mastering painting/cloning tools. Paint over bad complexions, replace part of a portrait with texture taken from elsewhere in the picture, and make other modifications using the painting and cloning tools.
• Adjusting with tonal controls. These allow you to change the brightness and contrast of an image, improving attributes you might not have been able to capture perfectly when the original photograph was taken.
• Applying blurring and sharpening. Blurring can de-emphasize parts of a picture, or make sharp portions appear even sharper. Sharpening tools also emphasize parts of an image, and can improve the contrast and apparent resolution of an image when you're not satisfied with the results you got in the original photograph.
• Correcting color. Automatic or even manual white-balance controls aren't perfect. Sometimes you need to adjust color in an image editor. Other times you might want to intentionally create an odd-ball color effect for artistic reasons. You'll often find this easier to do in an image editor than in your camera.