The Monday Retouch Episode 3 - Submit Your Image To Be Retouched For Free

It's Monday so it's time for another speed retouch and episode of Retouching Mondays. This week image comes courtesy of last weeks winner, Ben Scott. If you would like me to retouch your image and send you back the full-high res final image, all you have to do is post your image in the comments and wait to hear back. I will email the winner on Thursday morning, so post your newest favorite image that you want retouched. It can be any genre, beauty, fashion, landscape, wedding! I'll record the retouching and send you the final image to use as you wish! Take a look at the speed retouch of Ben's image and let me know in the comments if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. Now lets take a look at the before and after and the challenges for this week's Monday Retouch.

The Challenge

This week's image from Ben was incredibly done, great job to Ben. The retouch was actually a bit misleading from my end though. When I first opened it up in Photoshop, I noticed that the model had great skin for beauty retouching. There were very few major texture areas that needed fixing and really no large areas that needed Dodge and Burn, so I though it would be a quick one. That led me to work tighter and zoom in and it wind up that I spent longer on this image then on the others, because I started working on the smaller areas and found a lot of small texture issues to correct. There were some specs of makeup that took time to correct, which can be absolutely normal. There were also many micro-transitions to address with dodge & burn. Deciding to go Black and White with this one, saved time with color correcting on the back end, but I wound up giving that time back by deciding to zoom in so tightly. The only really large area that needed Dodge & Burn was the front shoulder, just a bit of an adjustment to even things out, as you will see in the speed retouch. 

What's Next?

The nature of this type of image is that the hair is messy and strands of hair will be all over the place, so you don't need or really want to make the hair perfect or to correct every stray hair, but you don't want to address small clusters of hair that become distracting while still making sure it doesn't appear you've corrected it. The goal is to make the hair feel perfectly messy, controlled chaos so to speak. So for the "what's next" I would want to spend a bit of time addressing some of the hair clusters and then also the small light hair on the shoulder than you can see in the image below.

Again, great job to Ben Scott and thanks for sending over such a great image. If you would like me to retouch your photo, post it here in the comments, but please make sure you are checking Fstoppers on Thursday and Friday as well as your email regularly, so I can contact you for your high-res image! Can't wait to see your submissions!