Project for Individual Study: Learn to Retouch

If you’ll be taking many portraits, one thing you’ll want to learn for sure is how to retouch your pictures digitally. Few people are so great looking that their photographs can be used as-is with no modification. Do you really think Sharon Stone or Keanu Reeves look like that when they get up in the morning? Unless your subjects have Hollywood make-up artists at their beck and call, it’s likely you’ll need to optimize some of their physical features when you take the photos (perhaps using the lighting techniques described in this chapter), or do some work on their images later on.

Retouching photographs in Photoshop or another image editor is a lot of fun, not too difficult, and is certainly easier than when I started in photography and retouching artists were just that: artisan specialists skilled with brush and knife, who knew a bit of photographic chemistry that came in handy when bleaching or restoring colors.