A Little Bit About Retouching

I get asked quite a lot about how it is I do what I do. I've done a lot of retouching and I have ways of approaching each image. I always start with a light colour-balance and then if an image requires heavy re-shaping and liquifying, generally I'll move on to that and then do the skin. If there's not a lot of liquifying I'll just work on the skin first. But I thought it would just be easiest to show you the process with one of my retouched images. This photo is from the lovely Nina De Lianin. She had some images that she needed retouched and this was the one I was instantly drawn to. I knew as soon as I saw it that I wanted to give it a vintage beauty feel.

You can hover over each step to see the difference between the current step and the previous one.

ORIGINAL IMAGE

The image above is definitely beautiful, but to me it was missing drama and refinement.

CLEANING UP THE SKIN

The first thing I did was to go through and clean up all the skin and just quickly remove the bit of hair over her ear on the left side of the image and the hair that's still on her face near the ear too. This might look a little rough at first, but for me, it's about getting the big bits right and then focusing on finishing details on all. At this point, I've also tried to smooth out the shadow of the earring behind the ear and fix up the lipstick line on the bottom lip. To do all of these steps I've used the healing brush and clone tool.

When using these tools it's important to remember to match up skin textures, so if you're cleaning up the image around the eye, use the skin that's near the area that you want to fix to heal it. If you're using the clone stamp tool and you're using it with a low opacity it will make your image look blurred and it is all about maintaining the texture of the skin.

FIXING THE LITTLE DETAILS

Now we get to fixing up the little details that we started to set up in the previous step. Cleaning up the lines under the eyes, removing the fly away hairs and the hair on and around the ear. Below I've included a detail shot of this step so you can see the amount of work that actually goes into creating the clean, smooth skin & details.

HIGHLIGHTS/LOWLIGHTS AND SHAPING

Once you've cleaned up the skin in your image it's about creating great highlights and lowlights. In this instance, I've also noticed that the eyebrows needed to be shaped slightly along with the top lip (which I didn't really mind when I started editing the photo, but I wanted it to have a more defined line when I got to this point of the iamge). This can all be done, again with the clone and healing brush tools.

To create more dramatic highlights and lowlights you can do it multiple ways by either putting a layer with 50% grey on top of the image you are working on, setting it to "Soft Light" in the layer blend modes and using the brush tool with white(dodge) and black(burn) to create your highlights and lowlights. Another method is to use the dodge & burn tools for those same respective purposes.

Personally, I prefer to use a Soft Light layer as it's much more versatile and a non-destructive way of editing as you're not actually doing anything to your actual image.


ALMOST THERE

I have a variety of actions that I've either bought, been given or written myself that I sometimes apply to my photos to achieve a desired affect. In order to prepare for those actions, I sometimes have to change the levels of my photos to make them suit the actions more. In this instance, I knew that I wanted my photo to have a fairly high mid-tonal range, so I lightened both the highlights and midtones to suit the action I had made and tested for this photo.

THE FINAL PRODUCT

This is the final image with my vintage action applied to it. I think it suits the make-up and the style of the photography of the image. I loved the look of this image, but the hair that I'd cleaned up I thought made her head look a little too straight, so using the absolutely awesome Liquify tool, with the Push Left Tool selected, I rounded out her head shape. If you want to experiment with the liquify tool, start with your brush at a fairly large size, between 250 and 350, with your Brush Density & Brush Pressure set to between 1 and 4. You'll find that this actually alters the image quite a lot and it'll give you a lot of control with the way you shape your images.

At the end of the day it's all about creating a gorgeous overall image and retouching it to suit the model, the make-up and the photography.

If you are looking at playing with some actions, I quite like the Totally Rad Actions by Boutwell Studios as they are really easy to mix and match and it you are just starting out with actions you can check out the Get Totally Rad Recipes site for some ideas on how to mix and match the actions.

Hope you enjoyed and hope you have picked up a few things along the way. Let me know of any questions and I'm always more than happy to help fellow creatives.

At The End Of The Day, It's All About Love

Working long days and even longer nights can lead to craziness and getting sick, both of which I've experienced in the last few days. My lovely boyfriend has been hassling me to at least take the weekend off (which I did, begrudgingly) in order to try and regain some sanity. Those couple days off have though, given me a chance to think about the things that I've done in the last almost year that I Love Wednesdays has been around and about what I want to be doing and I have to say that I do absolutely love what I do.

I've been lucky enough to have worked with some awesome people and work on projects that I'm really proud of. I've done things that, quite frankly I wouldn't have even thought I could possibly do or that I would never have the chance to do.

I'm very glad to Nick for making me take some time off, I get so caught up in what I'm doing sometimes that I tend to forget about everything outside of work. However, now I have an epically busy week to catch up on everything I had planned for the weekend. I have work that needs to go out, work that needs to be finished, stylists to find and a multitude of other things. Still, I think I needed a couple of days off to reflect on the last few months and even more so the last few years. I am definitely not the same photographer, designer or even person I was when I started out and I look forward to changing and experiencing even more in the years to come. I leave you all with a couple of photos from a shoot I did last week.

I Love Wednesdays around and about

So,I Love Wednesdays has been lucky enough to be featured in quite a few places lately. As you know, I worked on the latest issue of Freestyle Magazine and a designer that I have photographed collections for PenelopeRED was featured in the current issue of the e-zine Viva La Moda in their Designer Spotlight section along with the Autumn/Winter shoot we did. It's always so rewarding to see your work appreciated and it's always awesome to see it in a magazine or e-zine.

I feel that Penelope and I have a little Mutual Admiration Society going on between us as I absolutely love her work and she's lovely to work with (which is also possibly the reason I'm always clamoring to do a photo shoot with her). You can check her out at her BLOG or WEBSITE. She recently had a little feature on me and I Love Wednesdays on her blog The World of Ms. Penelope Red and you can check it out HERE. I definitely agree with her sentiments that working in the creative industry we get to meet a lot of talented and creative people and I always look forward to working with Penelope. Her clothing is so wonderfully executed and creatively thought out that it's a pleasure to shoot and she always brings a great energy and enthusiasm onto the set and is great fun to work with.

Below is the front cover of Viva La Moda along with a couple of the interior pages we're featured in. To check it out, go to the Viva La Moda website.

Señor Iggsy

I had some fun last weekend taking some photos of my friend Igor. We had some Indian food, watched some telly and took some photos. Unfortunately my flash decided that it didn't like me half way through our shoot, but that just left more time for the Indian food and re-watching of Tron for the hundredth time. Such a weird and wonderful movie, and so hideously, awesomely kitchy. Anywho, here are some photos of Iggs, hope you like 'em.

And so another week comes to a close

I've been a busy bee this week and to be honest, I can't remember too much of it except for working lots. Yesterday I had a shoot for My Chameleon, a clothing website which is starting soon, it was all clothing items for the site and was an epic day. My entire body is now sore and I have a carpet burn on my elbow from when I was on the floor taking photos of the shoes and whatnot. I'll have some of those photos up on my website and here after the site goes live.

Also, I am a contributing photographer and retoucher in this month's Freestyle Magazine. I photographed the Jealous Ahura feature alongside a good mate and fellow photographer Ricardo Awadallah. It was a crazy last-minute day and we had traffic and torrential rain to contend with, but I think the photos turned out pretty sweet!

I was rather excited to see the final magazine and the images and I've scanned them for you to check out, along with the feature that is on the Freestyle Magazine Website

Nemanja's 3rd Birthday

It was my gorgeous nephew's 3rd Birthday party yesterday and it was a blast. There were so many cute kiddies, none of which really wanted to share their toys. I took my camera and new lens to test it out and document the day. There were so many cute moments with little food stuffed faces, chasing blown bubbles and an impromptu soccer game with a Thomas The Tank goal post that the kiddies seemed more interested in riding than watching the soccer game being played by the older kids and the dads. I thought I'd share with you my favourite moment of the day between the birthday boy Nemanja and his best-friend and uber crush, Maria-Bella.

It was so cute to see these two little kiddies, Nemanja is 3 and Maribe (Maria-Bella) has just turned 2, and the way they treat their crushes. Anywho, this is the favourite moment I was talking about. Nemanja was holding the mini soccer ball that they were throwing to each other when he just threw it away, ran up to Maribe and gave her an uber-hug. It was the sweetest thing I've seen in a while and I feel very lucky to have had my camera with me. Hope you enjoy.



And my favourite photo

New Lens, New Lens, New Lens

So, as you can probably tell from the title...I just got a new lens. I was convinced by Nick, after receiving my tax return from last year, to go buy it. I've been wanting to get a fast prime lens for some time, so convincing me was rather easy. I went with the Canon 85mm f1.8, which for the $575 price tag is a steal.

There are heaps of people who have already commented on the fact that I went with a non-L series lens, which for those of you who don't know is the "Luxury" or "Professional" series lens, but to be honest with you, I've seen lots and lots of comparisons between the two lenses and in my opinion the 85mm f1.8 is probably the best value for money of the Canon series lenses. The bokeh is amazing and the sharpness at 1.8 is crisp and beautiful...and with the $2200 price difference, it was an easy choice.

I have a shoot coming up on Saturday with my friend Igor and I can't wait to use it and experiment properly. At the moment I've only taken a couple of photos of Nick in our very dimly lit lounge room to test sharpness, which are below so you can check out the awesomeness of the lens, it is seriously fast. (please don't judge the photos, they were taken in haste...hahaha)

Enjoy!



On a side note, I totally love Nick's "serious" face in the first shot, priceless.