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Crediting Retouchers: What’s the big deal?

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Hey Pixels!

Before we begin, I must start this piece off by saying that I’m referring specifically to collaborations on social media/magazines, where the aim is to grow your fanbase/audiences, when appropriate, and all parties agree on written credit.

 

Hello guys and girls! *waves* welcome back to another blog post! I have to warn you up front that this one is somewhat of a baby megalodon in size, but don’t worry! There are pictures 😀

I’ve noticed over the last few years that retouchers are one of the rarest things to see in the credit list of a team. So I wanted to investigate further and start looking at why this may or may not happen and if it does happen to you (as a retoucher), what you could potentially do about it.

This is definitely from my own experience and may not reflect other people’s, though I do believe this to be quite commonplace, more so if an agreement was not in place.

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An extensive checklist (and fixes) for portrait retouching

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Happy Easter guys! This week I wanted to give you a handy guide for double-checking that your images (with people in them) are as free from distractions as possible, and how to fix any that appear, before you release them. There is another impressive article on how to do this with videos if you prefer some German humor ;).

I like to break my images down into 3 key areas (entirely because of Stefan). These are the following:

  1. Color Issues
  2. Luminosity Issues
  3. Texture/Structure Issues

As long as these three issues are covered, you have a wonderful base to assume that your image is going to be relatively distraction free.

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Want better portraits? Rotate your canvas while retouching.

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Once, the idea of rotating my canvas when retouching was jarring to me. I knew it was something my peers were doing but I just couldn’t be bothered to try it myself.

After a few one on one lessons where I was “forced” to do it by David Neilands, I actually found a surprising improvement in not only the end result but also in identifying problems quicker with fewer revisions.

Rotating the canvas is actually a technique that was popularised by Pratik Naik of Solstice Retouch. The guy knows his stuff, he won retoucher of the year last year!

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Quality over quantity – does Instagram care?

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Last week I took a gamble on the idea of quality over quantity. My Instagram was sitting at 6.6k followers, a number I’ve worked my butt off for.

To my frustration, I realized that my girlfriend was getting double my likes at a third of my following. After some more routing around, friends of mine were all getting 2,3 sometimes even 4 or 5 times my amount of likes with similar followers or less.

It’s not the likes that are important, but the engagement.

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My dad’s 3MP Fujifilm S1 Pro deals surprisingly well vs my 24MP Sony A7II!

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I had the rare pleasure of meeting up with my father this week and on my stop through we came onto the topic of progress. We were sharing ideas of what it was like shooting “back in his day” with a 17year old 3.4MP Fujifilm S1 DSLR vs. my current Sony A7II.

For fun, we decided to whip out the old camera and do a direct comparison with one thing in mind: Image Quality. How far has image quality come in 17 years and what benefits would it provide to most day to day users that are slapping the images straight onto social media anyway?

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Shot a person from below? Fix the perspective with a few clicks

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Something came to my attention recently thanks to some feedback from close friends. This was called “Fixing the Keystone” or “Keystoning” and it simply means making sure that your verticals are vertical and horizontals are horizontal.

A very simple concept and also one which architectural photographers will have been on top for decades.

Here’s how you can fix the problem in just a few clicks!

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A guide on how to approach dodge and burn, what are you trying to fix?

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Dodging and Burning images is something that I see every day in photography and it seems to have two purposes: Artistic character and removing luminosity based distractions.

Today I’m going to be talking about the latter, removing luminosity based distractions. I’m going to assume you already know how to do dodge and burn (and if not you should check this tutorial), so we’ll skip the baby steps and jump straight ahead to the point of the article!

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This video shows why it’s crucial to calibrate your monitor

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We’ve all heard it right? Calibrate your monitor otherwise, your colours will be different from what they should be, and your photographic work will become a potential mess without you even knowing how badly.

I recently sold my ASUS 27″ 4K monitor and side-graded to a 27″ Dell U2713H 1440p one instead. The main reasons being a wider colour gamut, a resolution easier on my eyesight (4k panels in Photoshop are just way too small for me, and the 200% option makes them far too big), and a way to gain some cash back.

On setting up the Dell for the first time at my house, I immediately noticed the extreme difference between my old calibrated 4K monitor and this new uncalibrated one.

However, this was quite a shock just how badly it was off by. It came with a piece of paper from Dell telling me that it was factory calibrated and was “smack on the money”. After doing a factory reset the monitor went from interpreting every colour as a variation of green (people looked like the incredible hulk) to a somewhat “I could work with this, but I wouldn’t trust it”.

Forward a couple of days and a good friend of mine Maarten De Booer shipped over his XRITE i1 pro for me to use to calibrate the new Dell.

The embedded video above shows you just how badly a factory reset monitor can be with regards to colour. And despite any amount of paperwork telling you it’s perfect, any pre-calibration should be ignored.

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