What's the most important skill for a retoucher?

In reading various blogs and articles by and about retouchers I see lots of folks focus on the dramatic before/afters as proof of a particular retoucher's skill.

Sure, that can be pretty impressive. But on some level that seems like we're focusing on the sizzle and not what's actually the more important skills a retoucher needs to have.

For instance when I'm working with a photographer such as Matthew Jordan Smith, or Jeremy Cowart, or Bob Stevens they give me a really good starting place and aren't looking for the dramatic difference in the final image.

What they're looking for is a collaborator who can help them get an image that really expresses their vision. After all as the retoucher, I'm working for them. And it's important for me to keep this in mind: in the end it's their vision and their image that we're working to perfect.

So for me Listening is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the skills I need to have as a retoucher.

Listening to my clients to gain a thorough understanding of what they're looking for and where they're looking to take a particular image will help me in working through all those little subjective decisions that come up along the way.

And it's only by listening will I be able to make sure I'm helping my clients get just the image they're looking for which will help me gain a happy client. And that's what I'm looking for.

So what do you think is the most important skill a retoucher needs to have? I'd love to read your comments and see where this leads.

Betty White is Hot In Cleveland

Recently I had the pleasure of working with Brad Johnson and all the great folks at Arsonal Design in Los Angeles creating images for the ad campaign promoting TV Land's latest new show "Hot In Cleveland."



With three women featuring long, wind-blown hair this project was quite the masking challenge. As Brad said this design was all about the hair and it had to look perfect.

For those who have worked on high end retouching you'll know that most of the masking plug-ins don't hold up well to close scrutiny. The edges usually need so much work after using the plug-in shortcuts that it's not often worth the trouble. But as I worked on this image I decided to try Photoshop CS5's new Refine Edge Brush and was pleasantly surprised to find that in this particular case it gave me a much better starting point than my usual method of carefully painting out each fly-away hair. Here is an example of one of the images that was used for Jane's hair, (yes there were several.)



On the right is the mask I created for her hair, and what the Refine Edge tool helped create here was the softer transitions necessary for the hair to properly blend with the other shots behind it. If the mask did not blend properly we'd have problems with the gray background adding a nasty fringe around the flying hairs.

Of course the mask as generated by the Refine Edge Brush did need some massaging before it worked properly, but in just a couple of hours using this tool I was able to get a much better result than spending many, many hours masking and painting the 'old school' way.

Subsequent experiments with this new feature showed it helped in some cases and did not in others. I'm still getting a good feel of when it will and when it won't be worth the time spent. But for this project it was truly a Life Saver. Thanks Adobe!

To see more about the complete campaign created by Arsonal go to: http://news.arsonal.com/ and read their blog post about it.

The Last Airbender

Next week the 'other Avatar' movie, "The Last Airbender", is due out hoping for a big debut weekend. Here in Los Angeles one of the local ad agencies I work with, BLT & Associates (www.bltomato.com), did a great job with the print campaign for this movie. Over the last couple of months I had the opportunity to help them out with doing the final retouching (Finishing) on several of the posters and billboards for this project. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Shadow Work

A recent discussion on ASMP's email list touched on creating realistic shadows so I thought I'd post a quick tip here describing one of my favorite ways of creating realistic shadows when creating composited images in Photoshop.

The most important things to remember about creating shadows are: 1) Proper shadows tend to be subjective - imagining what the perfect shadow looks like will drive you nuts. Everyone will have a different idea of what looks right. 2) Studying real light and shadows will help you 'see' what a realistic shadow looks like more accurately, making your subjective opinion just a little bit better bit by bit.

When painting a shadow it also helps to remember that 'real' shadows tend to have different parts. If the object casting the shadow is resting on something (like the ground) it will tend to have a core shadow right where it lands on the ground. And there will be a softer, gradating shadow as it blocks the light from hitting the ground.

The image above is from a series of images I worked on with photographer Richard Radstone last year. In this particular one of the challenges was to wrap the accordion around the palm tree. That particular task generated my first tutorial on the website, www.psd.tutsplus.com, which can be found here: http://bit.ly/3YEVfT

And of course after wrapping the accordion around the tree it needed to have some shadowing added to make it look like it really belonged there which brings us back to the topic at hand.

Adding the shadows involved creating 2 layers, one for the core shadow, and the other for the cast shadow. In this case I used the Multiply blending mode for both shadows because I like the way the colors of the shadows blend more naturally with the objects in the image.

The way the colors of the shadows blend is very important because shadows do have their own color and this is affected by the color of the ambient light and the color of the object the shadow is landing on. Using the Multiply mode while sampling 'real' shadow colors tends to work pretty well for me.

So for these shadows I sampled a darker color from the palm tree and experimented with a few strokes before deciding on a final color. Remember the darker the color the stronger, darker your shadow will be - but you can easily adjust that with the opacity of your shadow layers.

After settling on the right shadow color I made one layer, called it "Core Shadow", set the blending mode to "Multiply" and then using a smallish brush I painted along the area where the accordion was touching the palm tree. To keep this shadow layer from splashing over onto the sky I clipped it to the palm tree's layer as a clipping group.

After painting the core shadow I then made another layer set to Multiply blending and called it "Cast Shadow". Then I used a much larger brush and painted in the softer cast shadow keeping in mind the shape of the accordion and the direction of the light the accordion would be blocking to cast the shadow.

To get the gradating effect of the cast shadow you can either use a low opacity brush and build up the strokes closer to the object, or use a layer mask, or use the Eraser tool (set to a low opacity) to erase it away until you're happy with the result. I alternately use all 3 methods at times depending on what strikes my fancy that day.

The point here is that the shadows are painted with 2 layers, one for the core and one for the larger cast shadow. By making them independent I can then play with the opacity of each one and use the Move tool to nudge them into the right place if needed.

Using this method I've found it's much easier to create shadows for everything from accordions on trees to vitamin bottles on white. Simple eh?

Steve Austin and Damage

Here's a recent image I worked on with the good folks at BLT & Associates. This version is a poster sized crop of the overall image which was built to also accomodate billboards as well.

Just to give you an idea of the work that went into this image Steve's head was stripped onto another body (there are 2 guys with a build like that? Yikes!). Detail was added to the neck showing more collar bone & muscle definition etc. Since the shot of Steve's head was pretty blurry & low res looking detail had to be added along with lots of sharpening. Thanks to Joseph at BLT for a new sharpening technique involving the HiPass filter and the Linear Light blending mode. Cool new trick!

The background is built from various shots of crowds. Finally the smoke and color treatment was added overall to create the dark moodiness of the overall image.

Jeremy Cowart and the Blue Girl

As a digital artist/retoucher I love collaborating with photographers producing beautiful images like this one from Jeremy Cowart. From the dramatic backlighting he used to the inviting look in her eyes Jeremy created a great shot and it was a pleasure to work with him in creating the finished image shown here.




In working on this image with Jeremy I wanted to keep everything very subtle. The model had this beautiful, enchanting look and I loved the dramatic lighting Jeremy used to make her seem almost angelic. With such a great starting point I mostly worked on eliminating many of the stray, fly-away hairs that were highlighted by the backlighting or that ran over her eyes and face. I also worked on showing off her beautiful skin by smoothing out the extra texture picked up by the side lighting. Then I added just a little more light in her eyes and added just a touch of highlight to her lips.



Before -- After

Click here to see more of Jeremy's work.

Syncing ColorSettings or What's Safe about "Safe CMYK"?

A recent post to the APA Digital email list brought up an important topic I thought would be good to discuss here. When Adobe bundled their programs in the Creative Suite the idea was to make life easier for users. As all the programs now work together seamlessly the process of creating placing them in layouts and then printing those layouts should be easier than ever.

And with a thought to making Color Management just as easy Adobe enabled coordinating all the Color Management preferences through Bridge. But there is a big ‘Gotcha’ hiding here that could mean big problems for photographers and designers.

You see the problem lies in a preference nick-named “Safe CMYK”.

Normally “Safe CMYK” would sound like a good idea. But the question “Safe for Whom?” applies here. You see there are 2 sides of the equation: The Creative side (photographer-designer) and the Output side (printers). What’s safe for one is not necessarily safe for the other.

Safe CMYK was designed for the Output side of the equation. It's safe for the guy who runs the printing press because it will cause the fewest problems with the RIPs these guys use when outputting files on their presses.

But this same Safe CMYK setting also means if you’re not using a RIP you’re very likely going to see bad color on your own outputs.

The problem comes down to this, Safe CMYK tells InDesign and Illustrator to ignore any profiles embedded in CMYK images that are used in those programs. This means these programs will now assume all your CMYK images are all set to the same profile as the default CMYK profile for the program.

So if your default CMYK profile is something like the commonly used “US Web Coated (SWOP) v2” but you used something like “US Sheetfed Coated v2” when creating an image that was placed in an InDesign layout when the layout is printed to the non-RIP controlled printer (ie and Epson inkjet) the colors could come out pretty far off from what you expected.

Not so safe now, eh?

Now the question comes down to: What to do?

Fortunately there is a simple answer that just takes a few steps I’ll outline here. Setting the preferences correctly for your Creative Suite programs will ensure your Color Management policies work the way you expect and you’ll get the results you’re looking for.

The way Adobe envisioned us synchronizing the Color Settings for all the Creative Suite programs is to use Bridge as the central place to set these preferences. By setting them here in Bridge all the Color Settings will be automatically set the same way which should ensure that colors look the same across all the various Creative Suite programs. If you go to Bridge and choose Edit>Creative Suite Color Settings you'll see a dialogue box like this:

Note that here I have North American Prepress 2 chosen. This choice is supposed to be good for users who are working with RGB and CMYK images in the US. The important thing to note here is the phrase "CMYK values are preserved". This is the 'Gotcha' I was mentioning earlier.

Bridge can still be used to "Sync" the Color Settings across the Creative Suite programs if you have a Color Settings File with the proper settings chosen. The catch here is that since the setting we're worried about is something InDesign and Illustrator use, not Photoshop, you have to make your Color Settings file in InDesign or Illustrator and then go back to Bridge to "Sync" the Creative Suite Color Settings.

Both InDesign and Illustrator work the same with regards to making this Color Settings file so let's take a look at how it's done in Illustrator. As with all the Creative Suite programs you can bring up the Color Settings dialogue by going to Edit>Color Settings. That will bring up a dialogue box like this:

You'll see the CMYK policy is set to "Preserve Numbers (Ignore Linked Profiles)". This is the dangerous side of "Safe CMYK" and means that any embedded CMYK profiles will be ignored. To fix this setting all you have to do is click on that setting and choose "Preserve Embedded Profiles" like shown here:

Now click on the "Save" button and give your new settings a name you'll remember. I called mine "Prepress 2 modified". Next go back to Bridge and bring up the Color Settings dialogue once again. Once you're there if you scroll down the list you'll see your new setting listed there. Below you can see where I have highlighted the file I made:

Now all you have to do is choose the new settings file, click on Apply and you're done.

Easy? Yes! More work than it should be? Definitely. But now that you know you'll be practicing truly "Safe CMYK" in no time.