Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques is not a book for those who are retouchers or who want to be professional retouchers. It is a book for photographers who either don't have the time to send their work out, or can't afford to send them out to professionals and need to learn how to do it themselves. In most cases, a photographer is paid for shooting and not for retouching. All the same, the quality of retouching must be high.
The goal of Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques is to teach you how to be better, faster, and get more realistic results from your own retouching. For most of your work, you do not need every technique that a professional would need to know and so this book concentrates on the ones that you do.
Professional Portrait Retouching Techniques is 384 pages in length and is contained in seven chapters.
Chapter 1, "Naked Eyes," begins with the work of retouching the eyes. Since they are the window to the soul, and the fact that so many things can be done to them, this chapter is one of the largest in the book and will teach many techniques to bring the best out of the eyes.
In this chapter you will learn how to do things like increase the contrast in the iris, adding more life to the eyes, enhance or create catch lights, and brightening the whites of the eyes. You will also see how to remove veins in the eyes, making eyes larger or smaller, enhance eyelashes, work with eyebrows, and sharpening eyes to make them sparkle.
Chapter 2, "Under My Skin," next concentrates on working with the skin. There are many ways that you can mess up skin texture and quality and these techniques will help you overcome these problems.
Techniques here include removing blemishes, how to avoid plastic-looking skin, various ways to soften skin, removing wrinkles, and removing hot spots. Included as well is how to balance skin tone, reduce stubble, apply digital make up, creating porcelain-looking skin, and sharpening portraits.
Chapter 3, "Face to Face," now looks on the face as a whole. Sometimes it may be the model or the client who says that there is a feature that is too large (or small) who will cue you in on something that needs adjusting, or it may be just painfully obvious that a feature can't be adjusted in the camera.
Article comments
1 - PoppaTom
I am thinking of purchasing this book, however I have CS3 and am wondering if there is anything in the book that I will not be able to do because of the version I have.