Photo Retouching

You know sometimes our photos just don't come out the way we thought they would. Maybe they are flat, lack sparkle or are just a little bit boring. A friend that I met through my favorite coffee shop in the city had just this problem. Her wedding photos, while ok, were straight shots from the camera. Some of these shots definitely needed some work on them. They were flat, often her face and that of her husbands were to dark, so through talking to her I offered to help out with retouching the photos.

Now this is just one of many I have touched up and I'll explain why I cropped it so harshly and what filters I used to create the overall effect.

Firstly I felt the photo had way to many distractions, the brick wall did nothing for me as did the open screen door, but the major distraction was the photographers own reflection in the window. This to me was a little funny, do you not look in the viewfinder before taking a shot?

Anyway I decided these distractions needed to be cropped out to centre the focus of the image on to the bride. So after some careful framing I decided it looked best in almost a square format.

If we look at this photo now we see it's not to bad but it still looks a little flat. So what did I do.

I use Photoshop CS4 and Nik software for my retouching. So first of all I took any blemishes off the skin. Then I used Nik software from then on, the reason for this is Nik software speeds up the retouching process and I prefer to not spend hours on a computer to retouch a photo.

The first thing I do is correct the highlight and shadows of an image. I can selectively do this with the Nik plugin, so with this image I selectively brightened her face and arms to make them stand out from the background. I then smoothed out her skin again using Nik software. I used to make masks and selections to do this but Nik makes it a one click process. I ran a contrast filter to boost that a little and then used one of the most common Nik filters. It's a bleach bypass filter and effectively copies what fashion photographers used to do with film. If you want to know more search the technique. I ran a small glamor glow after this and the image was basically done.

Again the effects that you can produce out of Nik software is huge and this is only one of many different versions I could have produced with the software. I have done many B&W's, Duo Toned, Sepia, and the list goes on.

Why I'm posting another article about Nik software is to show the speed and versatility you get from using it. It truly is a quick way of working in a digital workflow.

Well that's about it this time. I am avaliable for photo retouching so contact me if you would like to discuss what I can do for your photos.

Again just to show the difference about 10 minutes can make I have posted the two images side by side