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.
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