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Beauty Retouching

My wife and daughter read their fair share of magazines and hence are exposed to many commercial featuring beautiful women and men promoting stuff that we need to buy to become happy.

As my daughter is setting her sight on becoming a professional photographer we often discuss the commercials from a photographic perspective. The models are an illusion created to please our brain an create a stop effect. In real life they are still beautiful people, but in the adds they have undergone a transformation towards the unattainable ideal of a human being.

You won't believe what can be done on the photo retouching process. Sometimes it is gentle and subtle changes underlining the already existing beauty. But sometimes it is deep and transformative changes, that creates another person. I'm not a fan of the latter, but can accept minor retouching to enhance what is already there.

Let me give an example. In January I had the pleasure of working together with an new model with a very beautiful face. Let me present Rikke Grubb Carlsen:


 

This photo is SOOC - Straight Out Of Camera. Not bad at all and a good starting point for some retouching. My main tool is Adobe CS6 and the following retouching process took me 2 hours.

Below is the final photo. Can you see the differences? I won't go into the CS6 work flow but can recommend the training course "Beauty Retouching Workflow: The Calvin Hollywood Way" at kelbytraining.com.



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