We talked recently about the concept of beauty in modern society. A logical continuation of this topic is the question of the place of retouching in photography. The illusory nature of what is happening in the photo industry is obvious to its workers, but not to the majority of consumers of glossy (and not only) magazines. We asked the retouchers at Bespoke Pixel to outline what everyone who opens a fashion magazine or website should know and keep in mind.

Chasing the perfect
picture

We put on compression garments or drape in Rick Owens, push up our breasts, fake sun-bleached hair, brighten our skin with reflective foundation, and throw on 4-inch heels (or our personal equivalent). In other words, we are transforming our appearance to broadcast to environment personal statement, position, views - or lack thereof. In this case, where does our individuality emerge more: when, having made a thousand micro-changes from the shape of our nails to the shade of lipstick, we show up for a gala party, or the next morning, when we wake up disheveled, without makeup and with traces of a hangover on our faces? No one would think of reproaching a girl for using lengthening mascara and demanding that she take off her heels so as not to distort her height - this is a game accepted by society, the rules of which are well known to everyone. Where then is the ethical difference between a pimple being covered with foundation or a brush in a graphic editor?

In image processing, two adjacent stages can be distinguished: first - by necessity, is often an integral part of creating a digital image, and the second is the sticky territory of aesthetic decisions. The fact is that nothing much has changed since analog photography. A digital image requires development just as much as a film image. Only the analogue darkroom with reagents was replaced by Adobe Photoshop and other graphic editors. At the stage of such “digital development” (converting a RAW file into an image), you can adjust the brightness, contrast, tonality, saturation, sharpness and other parameters of the image. You need to understand that in this case, the pixels that make up the image remain in place, and only their properties are adjusted. This does not affect the content of the image, although the play of light can also visually transform the picture. An eloquent example is a photograph by Paul Hansen, winner of World Press Photo - 2013, where not a single pixel was shifted, but the dramatic “development” of the image caused heated debate about its admissibility.

Photo from Elle Ukraine (June 2013), retouched by Bespoke Pixel

History of retouching

The history of image manipulation is as old as photography itself. Back in the 1860s (photography was about 25 years old at that time), a discussion arose about retouching and its limits between the patriarch of Russian photography, Levitsky, and the president of the French photographic society, Davanne. Davann's point of view: the photographer can only “sketch” the general drawing of the subject on the negative, and retouching artists will complete the rest. Levitsky objected, allowing only technical retouching, filling in small dots and spots.

Initially, photography was a poor technical relative of painting and all the techniques from there were automatically transferred to photographs. Early photographers were often artists, and it was common practice to add necessary details to the print with brushes; photographs were hand-colored and judged using the same criteria as paintings. When shooting portraits, retouching was a must. Nadar's legendary portrait studio in Paris employed 26 people, 6 of whom were retouchers. Franz Fiedler, a German portrait painter and photographic theorist, wrote about late XIX century, when photography was only forty years old, like this: “Preference was given to those photo studios that most diligently resorted to retouching. Wrinkles on faces were covered up; freckled faces were completely “cleaned up” by retouching; grandmothers turned into young girls; character traits people were completely erased. An empty, flat mask was regarded as a successful portrait. Bad taste knew no bounds, and trade in it flourished.” Below is a slideshow based on materials from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Robert Johnson, 1930, a guide to retouching negatives.
Calvert Richard Jones, Capuchin Friars in Malta, 1846
This is one of the first documented retouched photographs. Calvert was a painter and blacked out one of the monks spoiling his composition on the negative. He not only brought photographs from his trip to Malta, which he sold as postcards, but also added human figures and details to some of them.
Charles Negret, 1850s. The candle fire was completed by hand; the technology of that time could not realize such a photo.
Henry Peach Robinson “Fading Away”, 1858. One of the most high-profile staged composite photographs of the time, which raised a number of ethical questions about the appropriateness of photographing certain topics (“no need to shoot black stuff!”).
Ernest Eugene Appert, who directed and filmed the “crimes” of the Parisian communards (actors in the photo). The photograph appeared in the press on May 24, 1871. Perhaps not all photographs of conflicts from neighboring countries are created equal.
1905, family “at Niagara Falls” (actually in the studio).
No, such corn did not grow in 1910, but it seems that we could become friends with George Cornish - we have a similar sense of humor.
Nikolai Antipov, Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov, Nikolai Shvernik and Nikolai Komarov at the Fifteenth Leningrad Regional Party Conference in Leningrad, 1926. Under Stalin, all important political photographs were retouched, completed, and his former comrades, as they fell into disgrace and repression, they were eliminated.
Nikolai Antipov, Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov and Nikolai Shvernik in the book “S. M. Kirov, 1886–1934" (Leningrad, 1936). Komarov was arrested and executed in 1937.
Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov and Nikolai Shvernik from “History of the USSR, Part 3”, Moscow, 1948. Antipov was arrested and executed in 1937.
Stalin and Kirov in “Joseph Stalin: short biography" Moscow, 1949.
Klim Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, 1938.
This is a previous photo from 1938, published in 1940. The retoucher removed the “enemy of the people” Yezhov (far right), former head NKVD, organizer and executor of mass repressions, later executed “for attempting a coup.”

What is
processing process

Covers of L'Officiel Ukraine, Elle Ukraine and Aeroflot Style, retouched in
Bespoke Pixel

Just as a chain of specialists works on the construction of a building - from an architect to an engineer and contractors - a published photograph is the result of the work of a team of professionals: art director, stylist, makeup artist, model, photographer and others, where the retoucher is one of the humble functional links. Each specialist has his own competence: the model cannot act in whatever she pleases, and the retoucher does not “play” with the picture in his own way. Each shoot has its own style direction, and post-processing should bring the team's idea to the maximum (“edits to your taste” or “make it beautiful for us” are usually the first red flag - most likely, the client does not know what he wants). In essence, the image processing process is an inextricable union of aesthetic choice and its technical implementation. That is, Photoshop is just a tool in the service of photography. Its technical capabilities allow you to perform almost unlimited manipulations with the image, changing the shape of objects, texture, color, and so on (there is an opinion that a typical order for retouchers looks like this). But, like any tool, it can be used for both good and evil. Therefore the critical point here is common sense. It is worth understanding that if the processing of a photograph clearly pulls the blanket over itself, this is not a disaster, but then the image would be more appropriately classified in the field of graphic or technical design

A team of professionals works on a fashion or beauty shoot even before the camera shutter clicks, in order to get closer to the ideal picture during the shooting process. Therefore, as a rule, it falls into our hands quality work, where a well-groomed woman of model appearance with correctly applied makeup is photographed by an experienced photographer in favorable light and with good optics. Next, we must do what was not possible (or even impossible) to achieve when taking photographs, adjust the image to a certain level, bring it closer to the author’s idea. A retoucher can make a wonderful photo ideal, a good photo very good, an average photo good, and a bad photo acceptable. Making a qualitative leap by two steps is unreasonably expensive, unrealistic and simply ineffective (unless it is a leap in the opposite direction - mediocre processing can kill a talented photograph). That is, ideally, the retoucher’s work is aimed not at correcting the image, but at improving it.

One of the clients' favorite edits is
Circle anything in the photo and sign: “What is this?”

Still from a shoot with Chanel's leading makeup artist in Ukraine for Harper's Bazaar Ukraine,
retouched Bespoke Pixel

Of course, each order is individual, but if you try to generalize our usual actions, we remove everything that distracts, interferes, or gets into your eyes. Add volume at the hair roots if they are loose. We lengthen the neck, remove some horizontal wrinkles on it, clean axillary folds and armpits, we finish painting the nails, we remove the cuticles, we correct makeup - the eyes, the eyelash line, sometimes we finish drawing them, we smooth out the moving eyelid, we bring uniformity of color. We clean the eyes: remove blood vessels, redness, and accentuate the pupil. We correct eyebrows, removing excess hairs, even out color and density, and edit the shape. Naturally, we work with pores, unevenness, and spots on the face. Pay attention to extra hairs in your hair. We correct the plasticity: body folds, waist definition, curve of the hips and back, remove goose bumps on the legs, always clean the heels. The list turns out to be impressive, but it is very prefabricated and usually each action takes no more than 15 minutes. Contrasting transformations excess weight in model parameters and, for example, twenty years of rejuvenation in our case remain one-time exceptions. We are not “Photoshop wizards”, but we are committed to helping clients refine their images to fit their style, brand, and long-term strategy.

In our opinion, the main task of processing is not “to make the photograph and the person in it better” - this phrase, due to its subjectivity, means absolutely nothing. Retouching and post-processing are not elusive things, not a Wildean fox hunt where the inexpressible pursues the inedible, but help in realizing the artistic vision of a photographer or art director. If the assigned task (shooting a lookbook or artistic photo shoot) is flawlessly implemented within the resources allocated for it, we can say that we have a “good” retouching. Unfortunately, there are cases when unsuccessful aesthetic decisions are made perfectly technically, and vice versa - excellent intentions suffer due to poor implementation. Therefore, when we encounter an unsuccessful shot, we are in no hurry to blame the retoucher; perhaps, “it was intended that way” by the art director of the shooting (or the person who bears his responsibilities).

It is worth noting that our personal, as retouchers, aesthetic preferences may not coincide with the author’s idea or the team’s project. When we receive the next iteration with the requirement to “make the model’s legs even thinner,” we feel uncomfortable and always try to reason with the customer, but we understand that this is a situation about a cross and panties. Since at heart we are against excessive processing and the “it’ll do, we’ll fix it in post-production” approach, to the best of our ability, we try to dissuade photographers from making too unrealistic changes. True, in our memory, no one went too far so much that we refused to fulfill an order for moral reasons (but maybe we are just shameless bitches). And here comes the fun part - what are the standards?

Standards and trends
in modern retouching

, nor the transformation of the heroine into a more perfect version of herself. Vogue always works as a window into another, “better” world, and not processing someone’s photographs means providing special preferences, placing them under different conditions. Lena herself responded truthfully, gracefully moving forward a number of her own previous statements: “A glossy magazine is a kind of beautiful fantasy. Vogue is not the place for realistic images women, but for sophisticated clothing, fashionable places and escapism. So if the article reflects my essence, but I'm dressed in Prada and surrounded by... wonderful men and dogs, what's the problem? If anyone wants to see what I look like in real life, let him turn on “Girls.”

Ethics, professional deformation
and the value of natural beauty

Fragment of the “Barber Shop” project

Do we think that we are setting unrealistic standards and complexes? On the one hand, yes, it is our hands that tighten waists and lengthen eyelashes. On the other hand, we cannot but agree with Lena Dunham - the glossy industry gives us a fairy tale, an illusion, a dream, which should be treated accordingly. And if we paint an ideal picture of the world, then we would be more willing to introduce a compulsory course on the nature of digital images in secondary schools - only its understanding will free a person from complexes and make him appreciate his body. Banning Photoshop will not solve the problem - even in real life there will always be someone with longer legs and a wider smile.

If we talk about personal preferences, we don’t like photographs that are polished to perfection and symmetry, although we know how to do it. We prefer slight irregularities and unique curves, so we try to preserve hairs, skin, pores, folds on fingers as much as possible - not to remake a person, but to emphasize his individuality. The fact that we are girls and know how to put on makeup, are interested in cosmetics and know how everything works, in turn, helps a lot in our work. In most cases, we can distinguish the makeup artist's intention from imperfect execution and make corrections where necessary without blurring the idea. And even if we don’t know what smoky fashion is this season, dear friends with beauty blogs and awareness in the fashion industry save us.

One day
the producer really asked
lengthen your arms
his aspiring ward, a petite singer

In general, retouching involves removing unnecessary details, eliminating defects, color correction, restoration and other work aimed at improving image quality.

Photoshop has an impressive arsenal of photo retouching tools, which I'll talk about now.

Filters

We have already talked about filters in this lesson. There are a lot of them in Photoshop, and some are specifically designed for image retouching.

For example, we have an old photograph.

Defects spoil the picture too much, and partially solve the problem as much as possible short term The Dust and Scratches filter will help. To use it, do the following.

1. Open the photo.
2. In the main menu of the program, execute the command Filter -> Noise -> Dust and Scratches.

1. The filter has only a couple of settings.

• Radius. Determines the size of the area in which the program will search for pixels that are dissimilar to each other. The higher the value, the more defects the filter will remove, but the less sharp the photo will ultimately become. In the case of the selected image, I settled on the value 3.
• Isohelium. Specifies the tonal difference of the pixels to be replaced. Experiment with the parameter. I set the value to 0.

1. Click OK and evaluate the result.

Some defects (especially on a dark background) became less pronounced, but the image became more blurred.

In order not to spoil the entire photo by reducing the contrast, you can apply a filter to a specific area of ​​the photo. For practice, let's try to remove a long horizontal scratch using the filter in question.

1. From the palette, select the Rectangular Marquee tool.
2. Highlight the defect.

1. Set up and apply a filter.

The scratch became less noticeable, but the quality of the rest of the photo was not affected. And although in this case the filter did not solve the problem completely and poorly, it, like many other filters, is still a retouching tool. It may not be perfect, but it is very fast.

The program has many more useful filters for retouching. In particular, the filters of the Sharpening group allow you to give clarity to the details of the image, and the filters of the Noise group are needed to either mask defects that disrupt the harmony of the picture, or, conversely, remove roughness that spoils the photo. Using the Blur group filters, you can smooth out minor details and rid images of scanning defects.

In general, take a closer look at filters; they are an extremely useful and very diverse category of tools.

The group of retouching tools, which opens by clicking on the icon, consists of five tools.

Spot healing brush. Allows you to correct some imperfections in pictures in fully automatic mode. In the options bar, you can specify the diameter and type of brush, as well as enable or disable certain retouching settings. For example, apply restoration using texture, proximity matching, or fill.

Let's say we need to remove the mole in the photo below.

1. Select the Spot Healing Brush tool.
2. Set its size and style.
3. Click on the element to remove.

1. The mole has disappeared.

Restores sections of a photo based on a sample, taking pixels from the area you specify, comparing and adjusting them according to the characteristics in the retouched area.

As an example, let's remove the freckles from the photo below.

1. Select the Healing Brush tool and configure it (specify the type, diameter).
2. Point the pointer at the place where the replacement pixels will come from (in our case, the place without freckles).
3. Press the Alt key (the pointer will change to a crosshair) and hold it down and click to select the reference area.
4. Now draw on the freckles, removing them. The pixels will begin to replace and the retouching will work.

Patch. Allows you to cover one part of the image with another, copying the pixels of the source area to the destination area, replacing them.

Remember, in one of the lessons we included a seagull in a seascape? Let's now remove it from there using the Patch tool.

1. Open the image.

1. Select the Patch tool.
2. Outline the area to be erased (in our case, the seagull).
3. Using the mouse button pressed, move the area to where the program should take the pixels for replacement (for us this is the sky).
4. Immediately after you release the mouse button, the picture will change: the seagull will be replaced by pixels of the selected area.

Content-aware movement. The tool can work in two modes (selected from the list in the options bar).

• Moving. With it, you can move objects, moving them away or bringing them closer to each other.
• Expand. Allows you to clone objects and resize them.

As simple example We clone a seagull using this tool.

1. Open the image.

1. In the Options Bar, from the Mode drop-down list, select Expand.
2. Carefully select the seagull.

1. Move the area to the location where the bird clone will be located.

1. In the main menu of Photoshop, run the command Select -> Deselect Selection and look: there are two seagulls.

IN in this example The tool worked well, but is often not very accurate.

The tool removes red-eye and flash photography artifacts.

1. Open a photo that contains one of the imperfections removed by the function.

1. From the palette, select the Red Eye tool.
2. Click on the pupils with the mouse button to remove the effect.

1. If the desired result is not achieved, adjust the pupil size and darkening amount in the options bar.

Stamp

The group consists of only a couple of tools: Stamp and Pattern Stamp.

Stamp. A tool for copying pixels from one part of an image to another. Typically used to replace damaged areas - removing scratches, getting rid of stains, dust and other defects.

1. Open the old photo that we tried to process using the filter at the beginning of the article.

1. From the palette, select the Stamp tool.
2. Hover your mouse over the place where you want to take pixels to replace.
3. Hold down the Alt key and click to grab the pixels.
4. Release Alt and click on the damaged areas of the image, moving the selected pixels there.
5. Repeating steps 3-5, remove defects in different parts of the photo, remembering to select pixels that match the tones for cloning.
6. Save the result.

Pattern stamp. Unlike the usual one, it works with textures, which allows you to edit complex surfaces (water, human skin, etc.).

Eraser

The group includes three instruments.

Eraser. Like a real eraser, it erases what you have drawn. You can work with it like you would with a pencil or a brush: select a tool and, while holding down the mouse button, simply move the pointer where you want to erase.

Background eraser. It differs from the usual one in that it separates objects from the background, leaving behind transparency instead of color.

Magic eraser. The most convenient tool. A hybrid of a regular eraser and " magic wand", which allows you to clear the picture from the background in one click.

Let's say we want to free a puppy from the background.

1. Open the image in Photoshop.

1. Set up your instrument. To work well in our example, it is enough to change the tolerance to 150.

The following items are available in the Options Bar:

• Tolerance The value in this field determines how wide a range of pixels of similar tone the editor will consider as background and remove. How more value, the more pixels the program will erase.
• Smoothes the transition at the edges. If the button is pressed, the transition between the deleted and the remaining will be smooth.
• Erases only adjacent pixels. A tool with this option, if there are points of the same color in different parts of the picture, will delete only the area on which you click.
• Opacity. The field indicates the percentage of background transparency that needs to be erased. For example, if you set it to 50%, the erased part will only become half transparent.

1. Click on the background with your mouse and see what happens. Gray and white squares indicate transparency.

This concludes the tour of retouching tools, and I suggest moving on to the next lesson, from which you will learn about image correction tools.

This article is for beginners to explain what photo retouching is, how to properly process photos and provides recommendations for working in Photoshop.