Face Retouching
Professional face retouching is often time-consuming, especially in beauty photography. Cautious removing distractions on the skin, cleaning up hair, smoothing out textures and tones, and enhancing other features can take well over a couple of hours. Knowledge and skills are essential when it comes to manipulating face physiques realistically. One of the crucial points is to avoid over-retouching. We don’t want to change the individual look or character of the photographed person, neither to damage the artistic and anatomical sensibility of the photograph. No one want’s to be another victim of bad Photoshop surgery. Especially not in time, when (finally) natural look is becoming more appreciated than the old plastic-like model with non-realistic, heavily photoshopped shapes.
“Good face retouch is one that enhances the photography technically without destroying the individual character and beauty of a photographed person.”
As a retoucher, I can take care of many issues:
- Clear skin – removing of wrinkles, dark circles under eyes, blemishes, acne, redness and other skin imperfections without loss of natural skin tone and texture.
- Hair – is just as important as the skin – flyaway hair and unruly strands often make a mess in general appearance of the image. It’s often useful to smooth them out a bit.
- Face symmetry – the more symmetry a face has, the more visually appealing it is to the eye. Changes in face symmetry may be minimal, practically invisible, but very often make a huge difference in general effect.
- Shapes and lines – an interesting photograph always has lines and shapes at play. Some compositions are more static, while others are more dynamic and may not be evident to the viewer but affect the overall image perception.
- Light & shadows – correction of tones and enhance of highlights, shadows and form.
- Colour toning and contrast – colour correcting of skin and hair issues is a must, but colour toning is more an artistic choice. Changing hue and saturation is often used to provoke a certain mood in the photograph.
(As a source of demonstration photographs showed on this page I used free photo stocks: pexels.com and unsplash.com)