Retouching on a Younger Woman.
Posing, lighting, and the amount of soft focus on any image will deter-
mine the amount of retouching needed on a younger woman. But, as any
photographer knows, the younger the person, the more great skin tones
and less wrinkles to retouch. So in images of subjects in the twenty-one to
thirty age range, we mainly take out any uneven skin tones, retouch under
the eyes, add a little softening, etc. The more you can slim the subject by
posing, the less time you’ll have to spend at your computer using Photo-
shop’s liquify tool. A rule of thumb is that the subject should look like she
does in real life, only enhanced. You want her to be as beautiful as possi-
ble, but you want her husband to be able to recognize her!
We lightly retouch all images included in the slide show presentation.
We take one special image and do full retouching to show her what we can
do. This greatly helps increase the sale of our “digital enhancements” and
showcases the skills of our digital artists. We’ve found that the youngerCHAPTER EIGHTPostproduction
Left—We use this digital enhancement
price list for all of our studio portraiture.
Right—We call this style of retouching
and digital effect our “Illusion” tech-
nique. It’s very popular with our younger
clients and truly takes advantage of dig-
ital technology. We create this image in
Photoshop by simply drawing a box in a
new layer, adding a layer effect (usually
a shadow or a glowing edge), and burn-
ing in the edges of the image to create a
subtle vignette.
POSTPRODUCTION 81