Come on, come on, come on, come on! PHOTO RETOUCH me, baby!

Some people don't like retouched photos.  They have a photo-journalist-esque heart, and want brutally honest pictures ... fantasy and idealism be damned!   I'm not one of those people :-).  I love photoshop and retouching.  I want things to look as good as possible…  accuracy be damned!  I zap zits, paint uneven skin tones, add extra limbs … if the picture would be better served with a mystical rainbow-maned unicorn prancing along in the background, I'm all for it.

Mystic Unicorn FTW!!!

It doesn't help that more times than I'd like to admit, I'm fixing a mistake I made while shooting, but that's besides the point. :-D

There are many pitfalls with retouching, however.  Because it's really easy to overdo it.  And overdoing it does not look pretty.  A picture can turn into a cartoon real quick if you're not careful. 

Keep that doll away from the knives!

The trick is subtlety.  Early on, I fell into the overdoing it trap (I might still be in that trap) but the more you do it the better you get (at least that's how the theory goes) and so I'd like to think that I did a believable job on this happy couple I helped shoot the other day.

From drab to FAB!

After adjusting exposure, white balance and contrast, I cleaned up certain areas of the lovely Cindy's face, including evening her skin tone, zapping blemishes, and cleaning up a few dark spots under the eyes.  I also increased the color saturation on parts of their faces (like the lips). 

With this one the main adjustment was for exposure, since he was in shadow.

In the end, my goal in photo retouching is to make photos look better without it looking like I made the photos look better (if that makes any sense).  In other words, adjust the photos with enough subtlety that no one knows that I've made adjustments in the first place.  Hopefully I've done that with these photos, and double hopefully I get better at it in the future.

Thanks to Mike for letting me tag along with his shoot, and thanks to everyone else for reading.  Feel free to tell me what you think in the comments below.