To celebrate my work anniversary of one year as a retoucher, I thought about challenging myself with some more demanding and complex image alterations in Photoshop at home with my personal images. I can tell you, it's way faster to clean up rooms in real life than in Photoshop, but it does not make you as proud. :D
Here are a few images in before and after comparison.
To see it with a fancy interface and a flexible slider, make sure to check out my online retouch portfolio:
Hi Matthias!
Can I critique your work?
Thanks anyway for sharing!
Sure, go ahead!
Thanks! I love to talk about retouching!
About your room, you make some weird choices in terms of what you decided to left. Some things in the ledge of the window, mostly plants, and a tool I see near to the edge of the frame are very distracting. The lamp too, is bulky and I don't see any benefit in keeping it. But most than distracting, the chair that is leaning on the couch has a terrible ugly hard shadow. The shelf on the left is a mess too.
We are talking about a practice image, not a hero shot. If you wanted to make the best image possible I'm sure you were lighting properly and placed every prop thoughtfully so the better displaced in which some elements could be, the lighting or the lens distortion is out of the discussion.
So out of that, the things that I think you can improve apart from what I already said, reflection in the table is hard, need to get tone down and bring some texture there. I don't like the reflection in the triangular area in the furniture in the left neither, and in general, the two whole squares have to match each other.
Bring highlights down in the area outside the windows see what is blown up, and recover texture as much as possible
The clone cushion is so evident, you practically "copy and paste" the other one. If you are challenging yourself try to make the cloning unnoticed. That is, that if you show the retouched photo only, no one can know that is a clone.
The fire in the chimney, great touch!!!
And the radiator it can be cloning out too so we can have a cleaner shot
Thanks a lot Samuel!
To start off, I took this shot very quickly without any planning and post-production. In that image, I simply wanted to showcase cloning. This shot is only about that. It would never be in my photography portfolio. For that, I would wait for way better light, take an HDR blend everything, remove color casts and clean up the room. Of course, I could continue this whole shot, take out even more stuff, but after editing for 8 hours I felt it was enough to showcase my cloning skills and I got tired of it :D
I did not want to do any further post-production in the before and after comparison, to show only the clean cloning results. Further post-production would distract from that. That's at least what I thought.
Actually I'm happy you did not say anything about the cloning results that they would be bad or anything, besides the pillow. The image was all about object removal. :)
Thank you nonetheless for your critique!
ah ok! I understood wrong the purpose of the photo then. If I was known is for cloning results only, I wouldn't write all that.
Yes, your cloning skills are out of danger for what I can appreciate from here :D
Actually, I thought that you were a retoucher but not a photographer and after writing the critique went to your portfolio and saw that you are a photographer and I edited some things out of my comment.
Sorry my bad, I understood everything wrong from the beginning
haha don't worry :)
Still nice to have a constructive talk and here some thoughts! Don't hold back in the future :)
All good! I'm curious what are you coming up with. I assume you are a retoucher?
Oh I'm really new in this world but I have a background like Tattoo Artist and I have been always into illustration. I discovered that I love photography only three years ago and only the last year I have my first contacts with high-end photography and retouching etc.
About retouching, I learn from very talented people like Michael Woloszynowicz, Natalia Taffarel, Julia Kuzmenko or Pratik Naik. I don't find retouching difficult at all, you just have to know the methods and invert the time. And of course to have a good aesthetic sense and good taste.
Here you can see my retouching skills. Feel free to speak up whatever enters your mind :D
https://www.photographydoublebass.com/copia-de-contact
But really I'm a beginner and I'm learning new things every day!
Great work Matthias , I really admire your cloning skill.I would love you known your secrets of work.
Thank a lot, Balraj! :)
Basically all methods I used are written below the images on my website.
Check it out ;)