As photographers we can sometimes learn a lot from graphic and web designers. Many of them have been at this digital retouching thing longer than us old school film converts. Raise your hand if you’ve ever dodged and burned by hand! Boo yeah!
I’ve stumbled on one of the best lists of photoshop retouching do’s and dont’s on the webdesigner depot blog. A few of their tips…
- DON’T Rely Solely on Clone Stamp Tool for Your Dirty Work
- DO Use the History Brush
- DON’T Expect Gaussian Blur to Do All the Work, or Even a Clean Job
- DO Give the Pen Tool Some Love
- DO Experiment With Other Tools You Wouldn’t Normally Use
- DON’T Neglect the Many Selection Tools at Your Disposal
- DO Let the Liquify Filter Work Its Magic
- DON’T Overlook Quick Masks
- DO Heal Away the Pain
- and the list goes on and on and on
To read their rather in-depth reasons head on over to the full photoshop tips and tricks article. Be sure to give it some quality read time and a bookmark as I’m really not kidding when I say it’s in-depth.
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2 Comments at "The Best and Worst of Photoshop Retouching"
Having done the dodge and burn by hand soooooooooo many times myself, for touch-ups like the one pictured above, I can’t help but love my Portraiture plugin. The color masking makes the process quick and accurate and the degree of cover up is painless. It literally would cut the time down to a fifth of even fixing red-blotchy marks on a person face. Want to loose lines or crows feet? Done in a snap.
I bring this up merely to say there are dozens of filters and tools beyond the out-of-the-box Photoshop tools that make mounds of touch up work go by *days* sooner.
How about a show of hands for those of us who’ve had people ask to hide some cellulite or make their figure more/less “shapely?”
I’ve got to say my most heart-wrenching edit was when a family member had a friend with a newborn who didn’t live more than a few days. They had some photos of their girl, but she had a breathing tube in her nose in all of them. I was able to clone/stamp/mirror/brush/blur/smudge my way into making the tubes disappear, and now the few photos they had show her as the happy baby she was without the distracting medical apparatus. I’m told they were very happy with the results and I’m glad to hear it. Laymen don’t know what it takes to do stuff like that, but they appreciate the photoshop “magic.”
You’d think they’d use better photos for their examples. For some reason, spending much time healing out blemishes and liquifying a face that is out of focus because the camera focused on the background seems like a bit of a waste to me.
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