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.

Areas that are addressed in this segment are setting up, working with hair, head shape, and eye and ear shapes. You will see how to fade wrinkles, remove ear piercings, reshape lips, clean up teeth, add eyelashes, shape the body, as well as using local contrast and sharpening the image.

What I absolutely love about High-End Industry Retouching Techniques: Series One is that it is a very focused and well defined training video. It does not go into any areas that do not have to do with fashion image retouching. It does not take you down any paths that don't relate to fashion image processing; there is the one segment on 3D, but it has a specific point to get across that would not be easily demonstrated on an image. The techniques are sound, well covered, and explained with good background.

The instructor does a really superior job of going over the the techniques that he uses and he takes the time to explain what he is doing and throughout he is giving time saving workflow techniques and shortcuts. The other thing I like is that you also get the original file that was created using a Hasselblad H3D 39 megapixel camera to work with and to follow along to apply the steps.

You can watch a demonstration of how to shape lips or remove an ear piercing online; please note that these videos are smaller and compressed for web viewing. You can also see some samples of what these techniques will produce in a finished image.

You can get High-End Industry Retouching Techniques: Series Oneon DVD from Photoshop Retouching & Photography Tutorial Videos The DVD Training Package is $195 USD and contains everything you need.

One final thing, the video on the DVD is very good quality, it is clear and the controls are easy to use. If you want to really learn the techniques of the High Fashion Photographers then you need to check out High-End Industry Retouching Techniques: Series One

High-End Industry Retouching Techniques: Series One Lesson Listing:

Part One: Retouching Tools

• Introduction
• Levels
• Color balance
• Hue/Saturation
• Clone Stamp
• Healing brush
• Brush tool
• History brush
• Dodge & burn
• Eye Dropper
• Liquify
• Warp
• Unsharp Mask

Part Two: Complete Retouch

• Introduction
• 3D Modeling exercise
• ACR developing
• Retouch setup
• Image healing
• Hair shape with liquefy
• Head shape with warp
• Ear & eye shaping
• Modeling with dodge & burn
• Wrinkle fading
• Removing ear piercing
• Hiding ear veins
• Reshaping lips
• Adding lip color
• Removing eye veins
• Fading eye redness
• Teeth whitening
• Teeth de-yellowing
• Teeth shaping
• Adding lashes
• Filling in hair
• Hair shape liquefying
• Darkening lashes
• Making pupils pop
• Shaping the body
• Removing fly hairs
• Local contrast
• Sharpening