Did you know that there is a difference between editing and retouching? For the general public, what I'm going to write about today is known as photo editing and I think that most would say that it consists of changing the qualities of a photo to make it look better. In the commercial photography world, editing is actually the action of taking all the images from a shoot and filtering them down into a select few that a client can choose from. Retouching comes after the edit is made, and that is when images are made ready for publication.
The capabilities we have now when it comes to retouching photos is astounding. There are countless mobile apps to choose from to retouch on the go and several different programs to choose from for desktop retouching. We have the power to change lighting, color, focus, and several other aspects of an image within minutes. When I first got into what I now call retouching, I used the full capabilities of the tools that I had and used them to create images that were busy and loud. Now, I know that less is more and that lots of retouching cannot save an image that was bad in the first place. Even so, retouching software can salvage quite a bit if you know how to use it. Here's one of my favorite before and after images as an example.
As you can see, the image on the left is really dark and really yellow. I wanted to post this image when I was into a very bright and white look, so I had to do quite a bit to it. I don't usually retouch my images to this extent, but a using a drastic example will help me explain the process.
My favorite retouching software is Adobe Lightroom, they do have a free app but if you are subscribed to the Adobe Creative Suite, that will unlock some extra capabilities. For this image, since I knew that I needed to do quite a bit with color correction, I did that first and then went back to adjust the lighting.
I finished the retouching and then went back for screenshots, but these are the settings that are pretty standard for color correction. The first slider is for Temperature, if we use art terminology we'd say that the before photo was very warm. It was really yellow, so we call it warm. The other end of the scale is cool, if a photo has lots of bluer tones, it's described as cool. If you have a photo that leans towards either extremes, you can bring it back and balance out the color. In this case, I took the temperature pretty far into the blue range.
If you do that, you will see that the blues become overpowering. It wasn't a realistic look, so how do I take down the blues without making it too warm again? The Vibrance slider lets you change the brightness of the colors in your image. I slid it to the left to lessen the colors, so the blues became not as bright so the image was more neutral.
Temperature also affects the tint of your image. Warm tones generally lean to a green tint and cooler tones lean towards pink. Since I added blue tones, I took down the pink tint by just a hair.
Next, I went in to adjust the lighting. The original image was very dark, so I had to take the exposure way up. This change was pretty drastic, so I had to up the contrast a tiny bit (because the contrast setting can be too much very easily, so use it sparingly) and take down the shadows and the blacks. What's the difference between shadows and blacks? Shadows deals with the shadows of the images, where it is darker but not completely blown out. Blacks deals with the true blacks of your photo, where there isn't any other color. Shadows will deepen your shadows and Blacks will make your blacks blacker. I adjusted these so that the writing in the notebook would still be legible after I hiked up the exposure.
Highlights and Whites have the same principle, but upping the exposure so much made the paper almost blown out, so I took down the highlights to keep that detail there. I took the Whites up to keep the image bright overall.
The last tab I use is the Effects tab, and I generally don't do much here. These tools can get to be too much very easily so I use them sparingly. Clarity is an automatic tool for all that highlights and shadows business. If you go way high with clarity, it will give you an HDR (High Definition Resolution) look that some people do like, but it doesn't look very natural. I wanted the handwriting on my notebook to be legible, so I added a tiny bit of clarity.
Dehaze is a great tool for regaining detail from images that have smoke, smog, fog, or any other haze in them that could be obscuring your subject. I normally use it with landscape and concert photography, but a tiny bit on other images doesn't hurt.
And we're done! Looking at the before and after always helps me see the changes that have been made. They are almost never this drastic, but a drastic example was needed if I was going to explain these concepts to others who are not familiar with this subject. This is to show that this kind of correction is absolutely possible if you really need it, but you will save time if you try and have the right conditions for the image you want in the first place.
I hope you all found this interesting and that it's not too confusing. Thank you for reading!
xx, Hannah
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