The quality of every photographs matter in Fashion and Glamour Industry. It is the responsibility of the photographers to make the Fashion images look beautiful. Beauty Photo retouching includes many different aspects such as color replacement, removing unwanted elements, adding or removing shadows, adding or removing reflections, lighting correction, Skin correction, body sculpting, blur removal, etc. Retouching depends upon the aesthetic judgment of the artist besides knowing how to use the corrective tools or Plugins. With every image being unique, there is no single approach that works for every photograph. However, having a routine helps you carry out Fashion retouching or beauty retouching more efficiently.
- Preparation & Creating A Base Image
To get the best out of your RAW image, you can begin with exposure and color correction before exporting your image. Export different versions of the photo in a single PSD file. For the base layer, place the layer with medium exposure for the largest area of the image at the bottom of all layers. Mask these layers with black layer masks and paint them using a white soft brush. Flatten the image after revealing the exposed areas.
- Skin Correction
Start removing the fine lines, blemishes, and dots using the spot healing brush. Make sure you choose the very small brushes only during skin correction. You can use a black and white layer to even out the skin tone.
- Sculpting
You want the model to look in perfect shape and during retouching, you might need to Sculpting or reshape your model’s body or face virtually. You must be very careful during the reshaping process as you don’t want to change the appearance of the model with unnatural looking manipulations.
- Eyes & Face
Use proper red-eye correction techniques to add life to the eyes of the model. Zoom in the image and remove the blood vessels from the white part of the eyes with tools like stone clamp tool. Darken the eyeshadows and the eyebrows. Reshape the eyebrows and make sure that they are filled up properly. Reshape the lips & clean up the outlines. Look at the face and make sure that there are no visible blemishes and the face looks perfectly sculpted.
- Hair Styling
If the hairs of the model look frizzy, you need to correct them during the retouching. Use a healing brush to remove visible flyaway’s. Remove the hairs that cross over other hairs and break the flow. Add some extra shine to the hair.
Conclusion
Beauty retouching is an important step of the pre-production stage. You should know what to do and don’ts of Fashion and Beauty Retouching process. The goal is not to make a model look beautiful unnaturally, but to enhance the natural beauty of subtle corrections.
You should avoid taking up an assignment if the RAW files are not high-quality. If the pictures are not captured properly, to begin with, you cannot make them look beautiful artificially no matter how good your retouching skills are.
For beauty retouching, you need to know how to use beauty retouching tools efficiently, understand basic human anatomy, especially the anatomy of the face, know how to render light and shadow correctly and be aware of the color theory. Following the above-listed steps will streamline the process for you.
However, beauty retouching relies more on the eye of the artist than the tools and techniques available for the artists.
