A WORD ABOUT RETOUCHING… “JUST PHOTOSHOP IT!”

  • Published September 30th, 2011 by Jay at TMPortraits

We’ve dedicated our “Seasonal Special-II” gallery under the “Portfolio” tab to demonstrate the retouching improvements we typically make to your custom image(s). Customers are often surprised about our retouching charges, or the cost of a custom (retouched) portrait. Software is becoming more sophisticated all the time, and the general public’s mentality is to “just Photoshop it”! But Photoshop is not a verb, instead it’s a pricey piece of software that takes extensive training and lots of practice to use efficiently. 

All retouching work is now done "in-house" to control costs.  We purchased the latest version of Adobe Photoshop (CS5), and attended an intense Photoshop training course to improve our skills and efficiency.  In past years we have tried contracting out the retouching work, but we believe we can deliver a better quality image at a more affordable cost to our customers by "just Photoshop-ing it" ourselves!

Most of our retouching focuses on three areas of improvements:

(1)     Moving a head (or body) from one file to another, to create a final image in which EVERYONE looks good;
(2)     Cleaning up hair flies, blemishes, wrinkles, teeth, and/or problem areas in clothing, and;
(3)     Cleaning up the background.
 
 
When we photograph a family outdoors, the background is not always ideal. The Clinton Mill location is particularly challenging, as we have no control over parked cars, tents erected on Mill property, boaters on the river, gnats flying around, etc, etc. Please check out the images in our “Seasonal Special-II” gallery to see the type of things that are typically done to an image to make it look “picture perfect”.