Video Training Review: High-End Industry Retouching Techniques: Series One With Vitaly Druchinin

High-End Industry Retouching Techniques: Series One is the first in what will be a series of photographic retouching training videos that feature techniques that are in use by professionals in the fashion and beauty photography industry. These are not the same techniques that are in use in the glamour and portrait sector, the ones that soften and blur imperfections. Instead, these techniques attempt to be natural, clean, and unnoticeable.

High-End Industry Retouching Techniques is divided into two parts. The first part is "Retouching Tools" and contains detailed instructions for all of the tools that you will frequently use within Photoshop CS3 to master the techniques. The second part is "Complete Retouch," which will take you from start to finish in retouching a beauty image. All of the images come on the DVD (around 1.7 GB in high quality images). The video includes over three hours of training.

"Retouching Tools" begins with a brief introduction to the program and then gets down to business. First used is Levels, to control the look of the image. With Levels you can adjust density, color balance, and exposure. Next you work with the Color Balance tool as an alternative to Levels. Whereas with Levels you work with Channels, here you will work with the colors themselves. While not used as often, the Hue/Saturation tool lets you adjust the saturation levels in an image. The Clone Stamp is next used to duplicate one portion of an image on to another portion of an image. In this context it is helpful when you want to fill in something like eyelashes or skin imperfections.

This section continues with the uses of Healing brush, the Brush Tool, and the History brush, which are described in some detail. The video also explains where the best places to use them are. The Dodge and Burn tools are use to lighten and darken areas, the Eyedropper tool is used to sample colors in your image, the Liquefy tool for manipulating parts of the body, the Warp tool is used to manipulate larger areas, and finally the Unsharp Mask is used at the end to enhance the sharpness of the image.

"Complete Retouch" takes an image from beginning to end into high fashion retouching. This consists of 28 steps. In this section, you will work with the tools that you learned about previously. You begin with a 3D modeling exercise to show you how to get an image to have a 3D feel. This can prove to be invaluable when trying to change the structure of portions of the body.

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is a writer and a photographer out of Edmond Oklahoma. You can see his photographic and art work at T Michael Imaging as well as on Facebook.

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