Quite a few of my clients have asked me: What's Retouching?
Is it applying a filter over the photo?
The answer is 'Gosh No!'
Retouching is making fine adjustments to your photo to make it as perfect as possible.
When I retouch, this is the checklist I go through:
- Remove any background distractions,
- Fine tune family's skin tones (so that one person isn't significantly redder or yellower than other members of the family),
- Remove fine hair over face,
- Remove fine flyaway hair only if they're too distracting (I dislike over-smoothing the hair edge, because that looks really unnatural.)
- Remove snots, drools, pimples, scratches, bruises, bandaids (if requested),
- Remove double-chin for adults (if requested),
- Slight slimming for women (if requested),
- Reduce wrinkles (if requested),
- Remove shine on faces,
- Slight skin smoothing for women,
- Reduce dark circles under eyes,
- Remove redness in eyes,
- Whiten teeth (very subtle, matching adult's teeth to their children's pearly whites),
- Fine tune brightness/contrast to preserve details on very bright or very dark clothing,
- Fine tune colour adjustments,
- And any specific client requests.
It takes me between 20 minutes to well over an hour to retouch a photograph.
The changes are super subtle, but they take your photographs from 'good' to 'wow'!
