There are many different ways of achieving similar results using Photoshop. There are many different paths you can take that all lead to the same place, right? For example; There are a few different techniques out there for whitening teeth or eyes. Obviously some techniques are better than others and the only real way to find out why is to try all those different techniques and then pick the one that you’re comfortable with and the one that works for you.

Ultimately you have to trust your own instincts in determining which techniques gives you the best results. As a retoucher, it’s you that will determine the quality of outcome of the final retouched image. It’s your artistic eye and attention to detail that will overide any techniques that you learn. Techniques are just tools, like a paintbrush is just a tool. Learning different techniques won’t make you a better retoucher in the same way that buying more paintbrushes won’t make you a better artist.

Learn those different techniques, sure, but it’s more important to know how and when and why to use them and that’s something that can’t be taught.

As long as you’re happy with the results, you’re heading in the right direction.

There is one thing I want to mention that I see a lot of retouchers doing that I really want you to be aware of and try and avoid. I see it quite a lot and it’s a common mistake to make.

EYELID AMPUTATION!!!!!

Ok so first of all, let me just mention that the eyes are the window to the soul, remember?

So retouching the eyes is really important. They need to be bright, healthy, lively looking eyes as they are often a focal point. They need pin sharp focus and will usually have tweaked contrast and colour. Redness and bloodshot veins are removed and more detail is added to the iris. It’s also important to remember that the eyes are spheres and should retain their shape and translucent quality as well as the natural moisture and highlights.

Actually, I may do a whole post just about eyes and how to retouch them at some point… But what I want to talk about right now is the work done around the eyes.

Retouching around the eyes often involves removing wrinkles and lightening the dark areas or bags under the eyes. These are very common problems in portrait photography but all too often I see people get way too heavy handed with their retouching and end up completely removing the natural bulge of the lower eyelid. I see so many beauty/glamour retouch shots where people clone the skin right up underneath the eye, effectively removing all sign of there ever being an eyelid there.

This will often make the image look a little odd and it’s something you be aware of. Here’s a couple of examples of eyelid amputation:

Admittedly, I’ve seen some shocking examples of HDR and it’s really easy to overdo the effect. In fact if you were to ask a group of people what an HDR image looks like, you’re likely to get wildly different opinions on the subject. There seems to be a trend emerging to use the HDR processing technique to turn normal photographs into something else entirely. Photography may have been the starting point for these images, but it seems to be veering into the crazy world of fine art.

The majority of HDR shots that I’ve seen look way overdone. The colours either look overly saturated to the point of garish or curiously have very weak pastel shades. There will quite often be strange halos and a weird, sort of ‘blooming’ effect. Personally, I think this stuff look awful. It’s really quick and easy to get results like that. It seems to me that all the detail that was revealed in those dark and light areas is being overused. Consequently making the entire image look quite flat, as it now lacks the depth that those light and dark areas provided.

A lot of people seem compelled to defend really bad HDR images. They claim that all art is subjective and that declaring it good or bad is purely down to personal taste and opinion. At the same time you’ll find a lot of people quite willing to say that, actually, yes there are some pretty poor examples of HDR out there.

I’ve seen some awful images that have been created using HDR processing. But I don’t actually hate HDR as a technique because I’ve seen what can be achieved with it and I really believe that we shouldn’t be judging a technique by the worst examples of it, but by the best.

So what is HDR?

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range.
It’s basically become a term used to describe a way to ‘digitally develop’ your photos using the tonal information contained in multiple exposures of the same shot.

An underexposed shot will reveal details in the light areas of the photo which would otherwise be lost. Equally, an overexposed shot will reveal details in the dark areas of the photo. The shot with a normal exposure won’t have all that information in those light and dark areas, so a composite image of all three exposures can retain the interesting details from all three shots.

A lot of cameras support auto exposure bracketing (AEB) which can be utilised for creating HDR shots. It’s a good idea to also use a tripod and cable release, otherwise the shots won’t be identical and you’ll have all sorts of problems lining them up when you come to combine them. AEB will take the shots with different exposures automatically, all you have to do is set the EV (exposure value) of those shots. Once you have the shots, you can use various methods to merge them into a single image. There is a popular piece of software called Photomatix which is designed to do just that.

Download a trial version and see if you like it.

I’ve seen some amazing examples of what can be achieved by using HDR post processing techniques and I would advise people to not dismiss all HDR photography based on a few bad examples of it.

Don’t make your mind up as to what it is, without knowing what it can be.

When you have paying clients they will often ask for amends and if you plan ahead, you can make life a lot easier for yourself. All of the editing you perform in photoshop should always be non destructive.

What does this actually mean?

It basically means that any adjustments or changes you make in photoshop never permanently alter the original image file. You should be able to easily re-adjust the changes without any problems.
Think about this for a second, if you were to continuously edit the original image you really back yourself into a corner. If you make changes that you’re later unhappy with, you’ll wanna be able to go back and start over. But if you overwrite the original file it’s lost forever and you won’t be able to. Now this is a fairly simple concept to grasp for most people, but non destructive editing means a lot more than just keeping a copy of the original image on it’s own layer.

Any adjustments you make to brightness/contrast/hue/colour/saturation or anything else, should never be applied directly to the original image if you can help it. This includes any filters you may want to use or any erasing that needs to be done. It can all be done in a way that remains editable at all times. By taking the time to learn about Adjustment Layers, Smart Objects, Smart Filters and Layer Masks you’ll have a lot more control over your images.

Don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds.

I’m talking about things like using the B key to select the Brush tool, M for the Marquee tool, S for the Stamp tool. These make sense, right? Well don’t expect them to all be this easy.

The rate at which you learn this stuff should develop naturally over time, you can’t be expected to remember all of them at once. As you use them more and more, eventually shortcuts will become second nature and you won’t even think about it.

More advanced stuff like using the command, option and shift keys to act as modifier keys for whichever tool you have selected, is probably the most useful aspect of keyboard shortcuts and will speed up your workflow considerably.

But if you only ever learn one shortcut make it this one.

SAVING you work frequently is something you should get in the habit of doing as early as possible. But we’re all human and we forget. It’s only when you’re busy doing something that you tend to forget to save as often as you should, and without warning Photoshop will throw a fit and close.

It can be demoralising to have this screen pop up when you haven’t saved for a while. It’s popped up and ruined my life one too many times and I just had to do something about it. I now have a little application running called PS SAVE whevever I’m working in photoshop.

Every 10 minutes a dialogue box will pop up saying:

Just click yes and everything is taken care of. That way, when photoshop throws a hissy fit (again) at least you’ll only lose 10 minutes of hard graft. Worth having eh? Oh hell yeah, it is trust me.
Why this hasn’t been integrated into photoshop yet I have no idea. It’s only when you’ve lost a good 2 or 3 hours of work that you’ll start to looking for a solutions like this.

Download PS SAVE

Saying you can spot something that’s been ‘photoshopped’ seems to imply some sort of failure with the program, when in fact the outcome of an image is actually wholly dependent upon the person using the program.

Adobe Photoshop is after all, just a program. An amazingly versatile, professional, industry standard program, no doubt. But a program just the same. It doesn’t actually do anything by itself. There’s no magic involved. Just a lot of hard work, passion and talent. Photoshop is just a tool. Much the same way that a paintbrush is just a tool. It can make a huge difference who’s wielding it. 
A bad painting doesn’t imply a bad paintbrush does it?

Of course the most successful work produced using photoshop will usually go unnoticed, but I guess that’s the true indication of success. That’s when you know you must be doing something right. My goal is to use photoshop to the extent of it’s abilities, or at least the extent of mine and create a little magic along the way.

So, how can you control how everyone else sees your images?
Well the short answer is….

You can’t.

Everybody has their brightness, colour and contrast set differently. Not only that but there’s a whole range of different monitors, LCD, CRT, PLASMA all made by different companies with different colour profiles. Even different browsers will display images with subtle variations to the colour and brightness. It’s completely out of your hands.

It’s frustrating that you can’t guarantee that everyone sees the same thing as you on their own computer screens but it’s comparable to music in a way. The Artists/Musicians can produce something… But they can’t control how people hear it. Whether they listen to it on a top notch expensive Audio Note system or a cheap old knackered tape deck. How the listener experiences it is completely out of their control.

So you have to let it go a little bit.
I used to worry about this issue a lot. I was really concerned that the (FF0000) red that I see on my screen is probably a whole lot different to the exact same value red that you see. Now this may not seem like a such a big deal, but when you think in terms of web design and corporate identity how do you guarantee that people see the correct colour?

Think of the RED and WHITE of VODAFONE, the PINK and BLACK of HMV, the GREEN and YELLOW of BP and the ORANGE of ORANGE! These are not colours that can be compromised.

But go to Google Image Search and type in vodafone logo and look at all the various shades of red!!!??!!

Shocking…

How about the Orange logo?

These variations are a result of people uploading images that they think are the correct colour, they possibly even look the correct colour on their monitor. I really think there should be some kind of image police to stop people from uploading such awful images.

I’m lucky enough these days to not have to be stuck using a cheap and nasty LCD like I have in the past. Now I have a mac with a 23” Cinema Display. It’s professional industry standard stuff and at least now I know that on my screen it looks how it should.

Only now, there’s another issue entirely…

Printing something so that it looks exactly the same as it does on the screen is a complicated process and there’s a pretty steep learning curve if you’re gonna attempt to understand it. I know the things that I need to know but to be honest, CYMK, RGB, colour profiles, resolution, Gamut, I have a very basic understanding of this side of things.

Luckily, for the most part a very basic understanding is all you really need because there’s a whole profession dedicated to this called pre-press.

HISTORY

Image editing has been around for a very long time. Many years ago traditional photo editing was known as photo retouching and was performed by extremely skilled individuals. They used various darkroom techniques to allow them to alter images such as double-exposure, piecing photos or negatives together, dodging and burning and scratching polaroids. But there’s only so much that these techniques could accomplish. Significantly modifying an image involved actually painting onto the photographs or negatives with ink or paint using an airbrush. Even though tools such as the airbrush are no longer used for photo retouching you’ll still hear a lot of people use the term ‘airbrushing’ to describe digital retouching.

The 1980s saw the advent of digital retouching and consequently a lot of the old techniques became obsolete. The late 1980s saw the first appearance of Adobe Photoshop running on the Apple Macintosh and traditional photo retouching largely became a thing of the past. Photoshop is seen by many as a digital dark room and many of the traditional techniques such as dodging and burning remain.

The way that images are edited now has changed somewhat from a few years back, but the reasons for editing an image remain pretty much the same.

WHY EDIT?

The main reason for editing or altering existing imagery is to improve the image beyond what was capable when the shot was taken with a camera. This can include a number of adjustments such as simple colour or perspective correction, changing brightness and contrast, hue and saturation as well as the removal of scratches, dust or blemishes to more drastic changes such as the removal of distracting elements to draw focus to the subject, improving overall composition or merging one or more individual images into a single file.

The are many reasons why an image is edited. The changes made will usually result in an improvement. Practically every image you see in todays popular media culture has had some work done to it. Movie stars, musicians, fashion models and the world of advertising are all heavily focused on image and the better that image can be made to look means the more power it has in delivering a message.

But now also consider how it would be possible for a Holiday company to alter imagery of your possible holiday destination. Imagery is used to sell either a product, a service or an idea, but when those images are altered to a point where they are no longer representative and are no longer a truthful depiction there can be repercussions.

There’s been a lot of controversy over the years about what is acceptable and how far you should go with image editing. The moral repercussions of deceiving the general public into believing what they see is a troublesome topic and I’ll tell you about some of the more well known cases over the next few weeks.

Knowledge alone isn’t enough.
It’s the ability to know when and why to use certain techniques that you should focus on, not the fact that you’ve acquired the knowledge.

It’s the actual process that will determine your outcome. This is where all of your energy and focus should lie. So share everything you know and learn from others, but then apply that knowledge.

Work to the best of your ability… Then you’ll gain a significant competitive advantage.