Importance of Photo Retouching

What is Photo Retouching?

Whenever you work with products, model images, natural images etc, photo retouching service is a very essential part. By using professional photo retouching, it is possible to increase the beauty of any kind of image at a large extent and increase the glamour of the products.

In this way, we can do any kind of product defect and damaged area recovery with object removal, objects addition work by keeping the original shape to increase the glamour.

Photo Retouching Categories and Procedures

Digital photo retouching can be of various categories. For example- dust, spot, scratches, etc, are removed from the product surface.

As some extra objects are used in image frame or as a support to shot by maintaining product shape, perspective, it is necessary to remove those extra objects. For example:

Different types of product support removal

• Glue removal
• Stand removal
• Clip removal
• String removal
• Doll/Mannequin removal
• Pattern removal etc. are performed to make the product visible

Tools used for photo retouch

1. Clean up imperfections – patch tool

Once a retoucher has a great photo the first thing he has to clean up imperfections. In portrait photography some of the most common imperfections might be a scar, blemishes, veins in eyes, age spots and stray hairs on the face or redness. Experts usually use Photoshop patch tool for this.

2. Beautiful eyes – burn and dodge tool

To do this a retoucher cleans up the whites, brighten the iris, darken the eyelashes, darken eyeliner for the ladies, brighten the bone under your eyebrow, brighten the corner of the eyes and darken or fill in the eyebrows. The rule of thumb here is to do what a woman would try to do with makeup to enhance natural features.  So over-usage of this tool can destroy your image.

3. Whiten teeth – hue / saturation

Whiter teeth can make a smile look alive.  Even if a portrait image already has white teeth, the designer usually edits the hue / saturation a little to make the teeth shine out in the photograph.

4. Smooth skin – noise filter and Gaussian blur

The key to this is to not overdo it and make the skin look like plastic surgery.  Less is more!  Make sure not to smooth the lines around the noise, dimples, or smile lines.

5. Color correcting – curves layer mask & levels

Last but not least, color correcting.  Color correcting is important.  It’s the difference between a dull photo and a photo that pops.  A graphic designer likes to use the curves layer mask over the exposure layer mask because he has much more control over the RBG channels.  The levels layer mask is also sometimes needed when the metering in the photo isn’t quite perfect.

Advantages of image retouching

Despite shooting excellent pictures using a quality digital camera, at times it’s necessary to retouch the pictures taken to suit your photography business. This is when driven by a desire to turn your image into an art of transforming it into a completely new looking image so it can seek attention.

It’s necessary to retouch photos to increase their attractiveness and quality, hence improving their value. Alluring products are important as they will fetch potential customers which in turn will boost their sales turnover. An image attractiveness can well be improved by color correction, adjusting poor image lighting or restoring an image to its original color.

Image retouching can be used to add enhancements elements so as to transform an uninteresting photo into an eye-catching exhibit. Such enhancements include increasing or decreasing contrast, cropping to professional standards and removing reflections.

Photo retouching may be employed so as to hide or remove unwanted details that deprive focus away from the subject you wanted to emphasize. Such details might turn away potential customers. Removing such excessive backgrounds will not only improve the image focus, but also will create an excellent first impression to any potential client.

Retouching an image might be employed so as to retouch an old image that might have been subject to depreciation. This is when the photo colors have faded or lost tonality with time, have creases, torn or have missing areas. Editing such photos will eradicate belittling of your products or making them unsuitable.

While retouching photos, a designer must consider the final format of an image because many image viewers do not support all types of format. Anyway, image retouching is a very much popular image editing service for e-commerce, magazine, catalog, banner and ad design.