Retouching and Post Production

With Facebook’s reach going down hill, we’re all looking for something that will allow us to get in touch with as many people as possible and Instagram is that link. If you need persuading, follow up this article with Dave Geffin’s post about how to fully harness the app. Once you’re convinced, here are some things you can do to make sure your followers are getting the most bang for their buck and you're showing off your best work.

After spending a fair amount of time looking through the best images that the Fstoppers community has to offer, it's pretty easy to see what sets them apart. Not only are the shots themselves exceptional, but the post processing is world class (Julia Kuzmenko McKim and Michael Woloszynowicz, Photoshop extraordinaires, hold a few of our top spots). Photographers often take on their own post work either because of budget or wanting to maintain their full creative vision. Sometimes, even great photographers call on the retouching gods to lace their images with a bit of perfection. Marina Dean-Francis is one such retoucher (and photographer) with that incredible power.

Late last year, Trevor Dayley wrote an article which introduced me to the Mastin Labs Portra 400 film emulation preset system. As a long time Kodak Portra 400 shooter I was thrilled to see side-by-side comparisons of Portra 400 against digital with the preset. They looked darn near identical. Now Kirk Mastin, the mastermind behind the presets is gearing up to release his Fuji 400H preset system and I couldn't be more excited.

Have you ever considered creating an accurate and detailed 3D model from 2D photos? Probably not, it's incredibly difficult. Now, if you try to do it on a truly massive scale and have a huge castle as your subject, it makes it almost impossible to do by hand. The guys at Pix4D took it as a challenge to their software and not only modeled the outside, but also the inside of the castle, all in one interactive 3D model. To prove that it can be done by anyone, they decided to use only consumer cameras (GoPro, DSLR and a Mirrorless).

Though this probably won't surprise many of you, Apple is reportedly discontinuing development of their once-popular photo editing and organization platform, Aperture. Aperture was once considered on a level playing field with Adobe Lightroom, but Adobe's continued development and advancements to the software obviously have affected Apple's software, and today's announcement basically confirms that Apple also believes that Lightroom has since catapulted it beyond Aperture's reach.

From a retouching standpoint, there are few things more unpleasant or challenging than dealing with chunks of hair on the face, missing patches of skin texture and large folds of skin. Generally the existing tools in photoshop such as the healing brush or patch tool fail in these situations and we often end up with unnatural or unpolished results. When all else fails I often turn to a technique called texture grafting to deal with a multitude of issues.

The combination of two visually striking methods resulted in this surreal video by Vincent Brady. After checking the video, read on for some more information on the rig Vincent used to shoot with, and some insight on the programs he used to painstakingly stitch his images together for the final timelapse video.

In just a few days, I'll be teaching on Creative Live! Watch me over the course of three days (June 26-28), as I will be teaching and presenting about the art and business of retouching. We'll start right from the beginning of a shoot all the way to the finishing touches! I have the pleasure of bringing in Felix Kunze to shoot the photography portion of the event.

This past week I've been sleep deprived, socially inactive, and holding a camera in my hands for more than I ever have in my entire life. You see, this past week I've been working with PRO EDU to film my first tutorial series to go on sale at the Fstoppers store this summer. Though learning a lot about my own work and process, I think I learned the most when I used a rented PhaseOne IQ250 system for one of my shoots.

Adobe has made Lightroom Mobile available on iPhone, and has managed to keep all aspects of the software intact despite the much reduced screen size. The application works exactly the same as the iPad app, just on the smaller profile of your iPhone.

When someone tells a photographer that “their camera must be really good,” chances are the photographer will respond with an eye roll. The debate surrounding gear verses skill in the photography world is a tired albeit consistent discussion. Let’s not kid ourselves, gear does in fact matter. However, does a photographer need top of the line equipment to produce mind-blowing images? Take a look at this collection and decide for yourself.

Adobe is hosting a special event on June 18 to show the world what's new in their Creative Cloud set of applications, but today they released a short video highlighting one of the features they're working on in Photoshop: a new way to make automatic selections based on pixels in focus against those out of focus.

Alien Skin Exposure 6 was announced last month and previous versions are considered some of the best plugins available according to both myself and Lee Morris. Well, yesterday Exposure 6 was released and they were kind enough to give me a beta copy to use for the last few weeks, so I wanted to share with you my top 5 favorite features from the version of the highly functional software.

I've had some pretty amazing experiences in my life. Fstoppers.com has given me incredible opportunities like meeting Bon Jovi, or riding in the first Lamborghini Aventador in America. Our international workshop last week took a year of planning and insane amounts of stress. On top of it all, I had the flu during the entire week. Even still, last week was the most rewarding week of my life.

Aaron from Phlearn is back at it with this great tutorial. In it he shows you how to make freckles from scratch. This really unusual technique yields some pretty convincing results.

Have you ever wanted to take photographs like Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus or Martin Schoeller? Don't have time to put in all that pesky hard work to learn masterful control of lighting and post-processing? Soon, you may be able to have images just like theirs! Well, sort of. Researchers at MIT, in conjunction with Adobe, have developed an algorithm that mimics styles of iconic photographers transforming flat, lifeless photos into masterful imitations of art. No word yet on if there will be "taste" sliders or "restraint" clipping warnings.

It was something I’d been thinking about for a while. Casually admiring others and how they went about it so naturally. Watching from afar, admiring the differences between them and me and wondering if there every was going to be a day when I was comfortable enough to do it myself. The more I watched, the more interested I became. Soon, I began visiting websites, looking at the photos and day dreaming what it would be like when I had the nerve to do it myself.

According to his bio, Jesse Chen is a software engineer at Facebook and recent graduate of UC Berkeley. Jesse has a personal blog which we recently stumbled across that includes a blog post from 2012 that detailed how to go about stealing copyrighted images and removing watermarks.

This is the third part of The Ultimate Guide to the Dodge & Burn Technique. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 where we talked about the fundamentals and tools. Today we finally get to one of the actual setup variations for the Dodge & Burn technique in Photoshop. But before we begin, I'd like to share a few words of caution with you.

Form my teaching practice I have found that knowing the technique - the HOW-TO - never guarantees its successful implementation. In fact, when it's only the technique that a...

In photography - and in anything else, really - it seems as though when we first discover something new, whether it be a new camera, a new technique, and/or a new system of doing things, it’s fairly natural I think to want to use it all the time. When I first “discovered” photography, I immediately gravitated toward those photographers like Emily Soto, Zach Arias, Joey L, and Syl Arena.

In beauty and portrait retouching, one of the most important goals is to retain skin texture and keep the image from looking soft. We often however face a situation where the existing texture is unflattering and harsh. While we could heal out each pore or patch manually, this often leads to sub-par results and takes a long time. In this video I'll show you a unique, precise and fast way to target a particular texture frequency and offset it in a largely automated way.

This is the second part of The Ultimate Guide to the Dodge & Burn Technique. Check out Part 1, where I covered the fundamentals of light and shadow rendering in painting.

So, now that we understand that the shadows and highlights are what makes our 2-dimensional pictures appear to have more volume and dimensions, let's move on to the technical side of the Dodge & Burn implementation in retouching.

I've been using Photoshop since 1998 and if there was one thing that I've learned, it's that their slogan should be, "There is more than one way to skin a cat." We've seen a lot of videos on how to change the color of things using PS, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This one from Aaron Nace, of Phlearn, is quick, easy and you should add it to your arsenal.

Dodge & Burn (D&B) is a technique that came to us from the darkroom days when luminosity values in a photo could be only manipulated by the duration of the exposure of the light sensitive photographic paper. And while there’s so much that have already been published about it, I hope we can still shed some light on the aspects of it that are usually not mentioned in retouching tutorials.

Photography-related groups on Facebook are growing exponentially along with the exploding industry. As with many things in life, there are pros and cons when participating in these groups. One can experience valuable feedback, expertise and positive reinforcement from peers, while also experiencing nitpickers and people who pull you down. There are far more important elements often missed when discussing groups that could change the way you benefit from them... forever.

From time to time, we show of some behind the scenes videos of popular movies and TV shows that highlight the hard work done behind the camera to make the stories come alive. However, rarely do we get to see a side by side comparison of a visual effect heavy movie such as Final Destination 5, showing us all the hard work that is done to seamlessly create exciting moments on a budget.

Photographer Sam Hurd is sharing yet another one of his artistic photography techniques with his followers. He mastered The Brenizer Method, he basically had all of Amazon on backorder for Prisming, he ripped the lens mount right off his 50mm for Freelensing, and then he did some convex Lens Chimping. This time around, Sam attached an old anamorphic movie lens to his 85mm in order to shoot a very cinematic wide field of view. Take a look at how it works!

Wired's Design FX has given us a great behind the scenes video of everything that was involved in the updated Helicarrier crash scene for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The sheer scale of the project is astounding as FXGuide.com's Mike Seymour and ILM's Digital Models Supervisor Bruce Holcomb take us through the design of the crash and its scale to the actors on the green screen.

I've reviewed BlogStomp in the past, and decided it was a tool that all photographers should be using to create simple and beautiful collages. Announced today from the same team is AlbumStomp, containing all the features you've come to love from BlogStomp, but for the use of creating brilliantly beautiful and simple photo albums for your clients.

Most of the readers of this site I’d wager fall into the category of content creators, not content consumers. That being the case, rants about not being properly compensated for the hard work put in to producing images comes up every so often. But have you ever been on the other side of that situation?

The 1985 Amiga computer launch conference, demonstrated its graphics software by having Andy Warhol photoshop Blondie's lead singer, live, on his first ever computer.

In an instant, one can feel as though they are in another world. As a landscape photographer you have the power to transport someone in the blink of an eye and send them on a journey into your photography to see the incredible world we live in. Creating amazing landscapes goes far beyond just snapping photos using the HDR setting on an iPhone. Landscape photography can seem daunting, but after reading these secrets to landscape photography, there will be no excuse to why you can’t take mesmerizing landscapes yourself!

Photographer Chip Litherland initially thought mobile photography was a threat to photojournalism and a platform for visual gluttony and selfies. But once he started tinkering with Instagram, he fell in love with the medium and began making artistic, saturated double exposures that advanced his vision. Chip explains how he uses his iPhone alongside his DSLRs when on assignment and how it has changed his photography.

Brandon Cawood, from Dalton GA, has taken appreciating first responders to the next level. What began as a personal project to photograph local EMS personnel, soon blew up and went viral. Cawood captures priceless moments in the daily lives of firefighters, police and other public safety personnel. He has a movie poster style and pulls it off in a flawless manner.

It's a common problem to have a variation of colors across the skin in any image. This may occur for many reasons, such as blood flow, skin quality and texture, or lighting changes. It's always been a hassle to fix this since it requires some guess work and tweaking. It's often not as precise as it could be either. Michael Woloszynowicz has come up with a brilliant way of color correcting skin in a way that I've never seen before!

It's not the first time I'm sharing Michael Shainblums work and it won't be the last time. Timelapses are one of the most time consuming forms of photography and only a dedicated person with patience can produce quality results as often as Michael.

Aaron Nace recently made a video showing you a quick and easy way to make lens flare (in a blank layer) right in Photoshop. While it might not be quite as exciting as, say, removing a model's bra this is a really handy tip to add a little bit of interest to your images. This method lives the user more latitude when it comes to adjustment of color, intensity, rotation, blur, and scaling after the fact.

Getting it right in camera is one of the most important steps to achieving a great photograph, but color grading is what can really take your work to entirely new level. It has taken me nearly 2 years to find the right process and perfect combination to obtain the right look. And, over the course of my time writing for Fstoppers, I've been asked dozens of times about the coloring and process behind my imagery. Well, I've finally broken it all down in one quick tutorial.

Our friend Glyn Dewis has been sharing his straightforward and very helpful post-production tutorials with us for a long time. This time he shares about how to add dramatic sun beams to your photos in post-production. Something I've been trying to master for a long time! Read below to learn more about how Glyn created this cool elephant image from a safari park snapshot.

Recently I had an opportunity to try my hand at creating the new hotness in cyberspace, Flixel Photos Inc.’s Cinemagraph Pro for Mac, what they are calling a living photo creation software. Cinemagraph Pro allows users to easily create Cinemagraph images, a media form that combines elements of a moving video to a high quality still photograph or referred to as 'hybrid photography.'

Merely two years ago, Stanislav picked up his first camera: a Lumix G3 for $600. From that point forward his inspirational journey began. The majority of his mind-blowing work was taken in his attic using friends as models. Now he is known as Sean Archer - a natural light photographer who specializes in female portraits. His work is proof that it’s not about gear. It’s about the photographer; it's about the vision of the artist.

I love aviation and I love photography. So the other day, inspiration struck and I ran to LAX to capture a photo that compresses eight hours of airport traffic at one of the biggest airports in the world into a single frame. Here's how I did it.

This week at NAB, Adobe Premiere and After Effects are getting some new features, including Live Text Templates (After Effects text effects can be directly edited in Premiere), and keying effects in After Effects to provide better keying results with compressed footage among a host of other improvements.

Software company Red Giant has been making the plugins that video editors have been using to sweeten their edits since the days of MiniDV. Fan favorite Magic Bullet Looks has long offered stylized, preset looks for its users. It has just been announced that Red Giant will be updating Magic Bullet to version 2.5, along with updates to PluralEyes and BulletProof.

In recent years Photoshop has garnered more negative attention than any other platform that is utilized for image manipulation. Photoshop can be used to create unnatural product resulting in unrealistic expectations. As photographers and retouchers, we have the power to control what the media perceives as attractive.

Aaron Nace from Phlearn released a great video yesterday which highlights his technique into removing unwanted and distracting objects off of an image. In this case, he decided it was best to remove a bra strap off of the model in the photo using the spot healing brush in Photoshop.

Creative writer Kendra Eash wrote a painfully accurate article for Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendencies that put into perspective what most brand and corporation videos look and sound like. Taking it to the next level, stock clip site Dissolve realized it was indeed generic, and pulled together their own stock clips cut to Kendra's writing, resulting in a hilarious edit.

With the multiple methods of sharpening in Photoshop, a big issue is that many of them are applied globally without any consideration to edges and areas with varying level of per-existing sharpness. The result of these techniques can enhance issues of fringing or inconsistent results across the image. This method by Michael Woloszynowicz is by far the most intelligent method I've seen so far.

Sharpening is a mystery to many, some do it well and others don't. There are quite a few methods to sharpen an image including the use of a High Pass Filter, Unsharp Mask, Smart Sharpen and Camera Shake Removal in Adobe Photoshop CC. However, it’s similar to hearing nails on a chalkboard when I see an image that is over sharpened. I'm no saint, I'm certainly guilty of cranking Unsharp Mask, I just never found the right solution. Until now.

Color banding is a problem we encounter when retouching many of our images or making them ready for print, but in many of the cases we just ignore it hoping no one will notice. In this long and detailed video, photographer / illustrator Lee Varis explains why banding appears in our photos, how we can recognize it, and shows the best methods we can use to fix it.