Our approach to Portrait and Beauty retouching

Our beauty photography retouching example. Hover over the image to see before/after.
BEFORE:



In life, when we look at a real person's face with our eyes, we don't notice most of the imperfections in their appearance. All our senses are focused on tracking the emotions, facial expression, keeping with the conversation, looking at subtle changes in the person's face, being submersed in the overall feeling of the totality of a person, and unless we specifically focus on a certain facial feature, all the imperfections, uneven features, wrinkles, untidy hair and the evenness of makeup escape our attention.

All this is very different when we look at a picture of a person. When looking at a photograph we are trying to feel out the depicted person but we have a very limited amount of information available to us. We don't have the movement, the sound, the smell. We don't see how the facial features change and express emotions. All we have is a flat image, so we get into studying it thoroughly without skipping any details. Every minute imperfection becomes the center of our attention. And a naturally beautiful face may look less than perfect to us, down to completely unattractive.

In our retouching we take the reverse approach of a painter. When an artist paints a picture they add only details that are necessary to create a mood and reflect the personality or beauty or the concept. They don't add any imperfections that are distracting and not necessary in conveying the message.

We look at the portrait and evaluate the features from this perspective. What needs to stay, what can be softened but still preserve the subtleties of the expression and what can just go as it's a completely unnecessary detail and doesn't add value to the image, but only creates a point of unwanted attention.


AFTER:


In the final result of this beauty retouching example you can see how we've approached the photograph of this beautiful woman face. We started with removing the unwanted shadows under the eyes and cheeks which made the skin look instantly tighter, younger and healthier. We are very unlikely to notice it in real life but it's very visible on a photograph. The next step was to soften wrinkles around eyes. Most of them weren't removed completely to keep the face look natural. Since we don't need to emphasize age in this photo and need to make it appear youthful and healthy, this was the way to approach it. Otherwise, we would keep all the wrinkles and soften them ever so slightly, just to reduce their depth and contrast.

Face contouring was the next important step in retouching this image. The chick bones, the jaw line and the forehead highlighted, the shadows around the nose and on the cheeks flattened and made more even. The final steps in making this face so attractive and healthy were: highlighting the eyes and lips and a slight skin tone, makeup and color correction.

Now we can see the pure beauty of this face without having our attention trapped by unwanted shadows and imperfections.

You can find more examples of our beauty retouching services on this page:
MaximImages High-end Beauty and Portrait Photography Retouching Services