James E. O'Brien

Everybody like to look their best, especially when it comes to pictures. And everyone knows that the camera isn’t shy about capturing every detail, including puffy eyes, blemishes, wrinkles and other signs of aging, and well, you get the idea.  I’ve been learning photograph retouching techniques in conjunctions to learning how to restore old or damaged photographs, and I have been working at it for about a year.

Basic Retouching

The old saying about the camera doesn’t lie is very true. Shadows under our eyes are going to stand out like red flags. the same is true for blemishes, and discolorations. Equally true, a camera isn’t always spot on about getting the lighting and white balance right, along with a few other parameters. That’s where the human eye comes in.

In most cases, as with the above and below pictures, a little smoothing and reshaping is all that is needed to enhance natural beauty.  This type of retouching doesn’t take very long, maybe 5 to 10 minutes per image, but the results are impressive. In the picture below, I took an extra step and dimmed down the white counter-top because I thought it was too bright and distracting.

Another Example: Besides the obvious exposure issue with this picture, this young lady looks like she just got off a very long flight and could do with a few more hours of sleep. I also shifted the position of her right-facing eyebrow a bit, brightened her teeth, and just slightly adjusted her jaw line to make her face look more balanced.

Glamorizing

Retouching is also used to glamorize  photographs, which involves more processes than I would do in a typical retouching process. Glamorizing removes all of life’s little defects and enhances focused elements of the photograph. In the image below, my focus was primarily on the model’s eyes. If you look closely, you also see that I reshaped the model’s face and facial features.

 Coming Soon!

I will be adding more content to this post very soon. This will include changing backgrounds, and removing and adding objects or people to photographs.