Photographs now make a significant part of businesses with the rise of online marketing. You need to showcase your products in the best light to entice customers to buy them. There are also corporate headshots designed to lend a human feel to your business.
Taking your corporate headshots is only the first step in projecting the right image. You will need to retouch them before posting them online or in your catalogues even if you use a high-end camera or a professional photographer.
Most corporates erroneously assume high-end photo retouching services and photo editing are the same things. Editing involves correction of the lighting, colour temperature and exposure and cropping of your image.
Retouching, on the other hand, is an extensive service involving removing blemishes — and sometimes people — from a photo, changing its background or compositing multiple images. Here are some of the skin retouching techniques that might be used for your corporate headshots or employee shoots.
1. Touch-Up Layer Technique
This technique effectively deals with skin spots, blemishes, and marks. It can also be used for the removal of makeup flakes, tiny misplaced hair strands, dust or lint. The touch-up layer retouching technique will however not work for hot spots, blotchy skin and multiple tiny blemishes.
2. Frequency Separation Technique
This retouching option works best for small blemishes, red patches, blotchy skin, flaky, dry and oily skin patches, and wrinkles. It is also perfect for smoothing up caked makeup, softening a blend between two composite images and removing mild and moderate hot spots.
Photos restored using frequency separation technique might, however, have a ‘plastic’ effect more so when the method is employed over a large surface.
3. Dodge and Burn Technique
This technique takes a long time compared with other options to retouch your images. Its final look is a textured and smooth-looking image which looks natural.
The dodge and burn restoration technique is hence the best choice for those aiming for a near-natural photo look. It can, however, result in areas of blotchy skin and decreased skin pores.
4. Hue Adjustment
Most digital photographs tend to over-saturate their colours and over-emphasize a red skin tone. Hue adjustment aims to adjust these colour disparities by the application of a hue adjustment layer. In most cases, hue adjustment is combined with the addition of grain to restore skin depth and texture.
5. Inverted High Pass Technique
This is a fast restoration technique but not routinely used by professionals. This is because the restoration destroys your original photo, results in a changed image which is usually blotched and has blurry image effects.
An inverted high pass restoration technique cannot also be used on the ‘hard edges’ of your images since the restorer has minimal control over the destruction of the image’s borders.
You will undoubtedly come across different software for DIY photo retouching. This software will however only usually edit your photo and not get your desired look. As such, getting a professional who is well-trained in the above techniques is essential to get the best retouched image look since they require a high expertise level.
