Image Retouching in Photoshop CC 2014

It’s very rare that we ever get a frame from our camera that doesn’t need retouching – that’s a FACT.

Imperfections in the frame can be both ‘behind the shutter’ and ‘in front of the lens’ – sensor dust and crud on the subject.  But you’ll take photographs where these imperfections are hard, if not impossible, to see under normal viewing.

But print that image BIG and those invisible faults will begin to be visually apparent; by which time it’s too bloomin’ late and they’ve cost you money; or worse still, a client.

The ‘visualise spots’ tool in Lightroom will show you a certain amount of ‘dust bunny’ type faults and errors, but the way Lightroom executes retouching repairs is not always ‘quite up to snuff’; and when it comes to dust, crap and other undesirables on the subject itself Lightroom will fail to recognise them in the first place.

Image retouching isn’t really all that difficult; but it can be an intensely tedious and time-consuming process.

To that end I’ve stuck these HD video lessons on my You Tube channel.

In these videos I illustrate how I deploy the Spot Healing brush, Healing Brush, Clone Tool, Patch Tool and Content Aware Fill command to carry out some basic image retouching on a shot of cutlery bright ware.

I demonstrate the addition of a ‘dust visibility’ curves adjustment layer – something that everyone should ‘get the hang’ of using – as a first step to effective image retouching.

When photographing glossy, high reflectivity subjects we need to remove the imperfections and smooth the surfaces of the subject without reducing the ‘glossiness’ and turning it matt!

Please note: a couple of these videos are in excess of 20 minutes duration and they will look better at full resolution HDV if you click the You Tube icon. Also, it takes a lot longer to do a job when you have to talk about at the same time!

I hope you get some idea as to how simple and straightforward my approach to image retouching is!

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