This is an article written a long time ago, but I think it still has value today.
For this episode, I’ll put down my pressure-sensitive pen and create some original content. Let’s talk about the common photo editing techniques used in high-end photography post-production. In this episode, we’ll focus on basic image enhancement techniques, which can be understood as skin retouching and lighting adjustment, without getting into color correction, liquification, etc.
I used to live in Beijing and work for a well-known cultural and media company located near the Huan Tie Yi Xian railway station. I started as a photography assistant and worked my way up to a post-production image retoucher. Because I didn’t have any formal training or education in photography, I had to take many detours. Although my technical skills are not exceptional, I have learned a lot and would like to share my knowledge with anyone who is interested in photography and post-production.
At present, the basic methods of image editing used in commercial image editing or higher-end wedding and portrait post-production are basically the same, which are derived from the DB image editing concept. And the so-called DB image editing is the abbreviation of the English words of the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop.
Note: The deepen and lighten adjustment is a powerful editing tool that primarily works to alter light and shadow, rather than for skin smoothing.
With the development of DB retouching techniques in China, hyperbolic retouching, neutral gray retouching, soft light layer, brightness layer and so on retouching techniques are correspondingly born, but all change from its family, these methods belong to the category of thinning and deepening, below I will introduce several retouching techniques briefly.
In order to work with images using the dairy-darken method, whether hyperbolic or neutral gray, and other similar techniques, it is best for unskilled retouchers to create a set of observation layers, known as viewers.
The purpose of creating the viewer is to turn the film into black and white, in this step we can choose a variety of methods such as (new black and white layer, hue saturation layer, color mode of black layer, etc.), when the film only black and white, we can see the picture of those disharmonious or dark areas, that is, we need to deal with the key points.
Although the decoration points appear, but often not obvious, at this time we need to create a second layer, under normal circumstances we will choose the curve layer, strengthen the contrast, this time you will find that the original not obvious spots appear one by one, the picture is really amazing.
Once both layers are created, we put them into a group so we can view them when we need them and hide them when we don’t.
It needs to be added here that do not use too much force when the curve is compared, so as to avoid excessive modification. Here is a detailed explanation of these retouching techniques!
The first, which is also a technique that I personally use for skin treatment, is hyperbolic retouching
Create two new curve layers, one to lighten and one to darken, then reverse the white mask to black, and use the white brush to wipe over the mask where you want to change.
Advantages: The thinning and deepening layer does not interfere with each other, the modification is simple, and the overall color of the skin is not easy to change.
Disadvantages: Because the reduction and deepening are a single layer, you need to click the layer separately, and the operation is more complicated.
The second, which is easier to operate than a hyperbola, is neutral gray retouching
After creating the medium gray layer, use the brush to retouch the gray layer, and use the shortcut key X to switch the black and white brush
Advantages: All operations are completed on a single layer, easy to operate, you can select this layer to observe the retouching traces.
Disadvantages: It is easy to cause local skin color to change, requiring late complementary color, and can not directly modify this layer.
Third, soft light layer and brightness layer
Advantages: All operations are completed on a single layer, easy to operate, easy to modify can be directly operated on this image.
Disadvantages: It is also easy to change the local skin color too much, the need for late complementary color, can not view the modification traces.
A simple introduction to the basic law of these types of portrait retouching, I believe that now many retouching artists have been skilled in mastering these retouching techniques, and now AI technology has been changing with each passing day, many of the third party software to remove ps has been able to do a key retouching at the same time only need to simply adjust some parameters to get a good retouching effect.
These AI retouching software can well liberate the hands and eyes of our retouching artists, and greatly improve the efficiency of our retouching. However, these so-called intelligent retouching software can only be considered semi-intelligent, after all, the beauty and ugly-looking code of a film is currently no concept, and we need to control the retouching artist personally. This also shows how important it is for a retoucher to have an aesthetic ability.
AI retouching can not be used, but it can not be used all the time, the basic repetitive fatigue can be handed over to it, but in the key steps of the hammer still need to rely on our own is the right way.