Photo Retouching

Photo Retouching – Past and Present
I started working with digital image retouching and manipulation back in the the mid 90′s, and in that time have worked on just about every kind of image subject there is! Before this time photographic retouching was performed in a darkened room working on photographic film positives. The retoucher would use dyes with brushes and masking film to separate the areas to be worked on. They would use a huge magnifying glass on a bending arm to see the detail up close. This was a very skilled job and took an army of people to supply a constant flow of work through the studio.
Digital retouching revolutionised this process and has now become a common thing for most people to have a dabble with, due to software like Photoshop and a myriad of simple to use photo editing programmes.The basic principals and techniques have not changed, and can be broken down into these main categories:
Retouching – Main Categories
• Masking
• Blending
• Patching
• Cloning
• Duplicating
• Colour Correction
• Burning Dodging
• Creating Shadows
• Multiple Element Composition
• Distortion and warping
Some of these techniques can only be performed with professional software, and a whole chunk of experience and skill, but it’s great fun to have a go!
Patching and Cloning. The stuff that you will probably try first would be patching or cloning on someone’s face to remove blemishes, or a scene where there is an unwanted object like a sign or lamp post growing out of the subject head.
Colour Correction. You might also try some colour correction where the lighting was indoor fluorescent, or had a cast from a strong sunset.
Burning and dodging. Burning and dodging gets it’s terminology from the darkroom where a negative would be exposed to light sensitive photographic paper, and the operator would use simple tools to restrict the amount of light hitting a particular area, or adversley allow more light to fall on an area. The ‘burn’ would be where more light fell, and the ‘dodge’ would be where less light fell.
This had the affect of gently darkening or lightening the exposure, but was not very controllable ,and there was no undo key to go back to what you had before!
I will be publishing further articles based on the main retouching categories above to more insight and hopefully some video tutorials in the future. I hope you enjoyed this publication, and thanks for taking the time to read it.

About the Author

Dean Hawthornthwaite is a graphic designer and retoucher who has worked in the media for over 30 years.