In my ongoing quest to improve my photography I had decided that retouching, especially of models skin, was one of my weak areas.
So I contacted a few photographers on Purestorm whose work I admired, asking them about retouching workshops. Some politely declined, while others wanted to charge quite large amount of money for quite short sessions.
Then I got a reply from Carl Davis who has some great work, was offering 1 to 1 workshops at quite reasonable rates, and wasn’t too far from where I lived.
The results from the workshop on one of the images we worked on is shown below, on the left is Before and on the right is After, the picture is of Monika taken last year.
In my opinion a lot of photographers oversmooth the models skin in their images so that there is no texture left, leading to the models looking rather strange almost like dolls. The techniques Carl uses do not do that, and while the After image is a vast improvement it still looks realistic.
While Carl’s images are of a quite different style from mine, his techniques are quite general and useful on any style of image. So I can now go back through all my images, working out which ones to work on with my new found skills.
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