Photo Retouching

Retouching photo's is a passion of mine...... I love to make a great image even better......or repair an old torn family favorite.........Most of all I like to like to make average model images look print ready...I know many like to see models "as is" and all of the flaws that make them human....I enjoy all of that........Yet love the challenge of making the ordinary look extraordinary.....

Please do not post any fakes in this thread!........I hope other creative persons here will share their stuff...........And If you got a pic you would like to see retouched.........please share.....I will work on it if it is a quality image.......

Requests are welcome........

I will start out with a family photo I retouched.........And a random model..........retouched........

 

Nice, Kaos!

 

Nice idea, kaos But I actually have no request. Can't wait to see more.

 

Awesome work Kaos, i dont know how you do it but the end result is outstanding.

 

One of Sexy Summer's with permission.....

 

Awesome............CF You really do have a superior knowledge of lighting.......Makes the pic pop big time! Thanks!

 

If you mean I added lighting effects ... no.

As one could see right of the photo it was quite underexposed; the histogram showed a complete lack of highlights and a curve dying off in the center of the midtones.

According to the metadata the photo was taken on 10/03/2005 with a Canon 20D and a 24-70mm f/2.8 standard zoom lens (focal lenght 64mm - f/11.0 - ISO 100 - 1/200sec - flash did not fire). The exposure mode was set to manual and he didn't compensate for lack of light resulting in an underexposed photo (about 1.5 stops).

So the first thing in your workflow is to evaluate the histogram and correct the shadows, midtones and highlights before you move to the real retouching.

In jpeg, correcting the highlights is a basic adjustement with levels, moving the right slider (highlights) to the left.
The midtones (where the color of her necklace, eyes etc... is) are then corrected by moving the gamma slider. Fine tuning is done using curves.
(If the photo was in RAW format -straight from the camera sensor- an Exposure adjustment layer is the better option before moving to curves.)

Here is the result correcting the exposure:



Now you have more texture, details and color contrast resulting in an easier way of retouching the image.

 

Another quick example of model retouching.

Source Output

 

Hi I'm new to photoshop so i'd appreciate some helpful feedback

 

You guys are all really talented. The Emma photoshop is superb. All of my retouching is in my porn, which is on the boards.