High end beauty retouching in less than 15 minutes?
Last weekend I was in the studio shooting senior portraits**. We had six young ladies in on Saturday and with 2 looks each I’m sure you can imagine that adds up to a lot of images. Just over 80 final images that needing to go through my beauty retouching cycle. What’s more, every image needed to be magazine quality and available for the client by Tuesday evening.
Time was not on my side, especially as I hand retouch every image personally.
Yes — I could automate it but to be honest I don’t like the overprocessed, same-old same-old look that many of my coleagues produce. Plus, I charge a premium price because I hand finish the images so automating and outsourcing aren’t really avenues that I want to pursue for strategic reasons. To me, beauty retouching is just as much a part of the creative process as the lighting, styling, directing and making the images. It’s ingrained in my very style.
Thankfully I had a few tricks up my sleeve. In an earlier post I wrote about the benefits of having a defined process to improve client experience. That same rationale is as equally applicable to retouching as it is to running the ops side of your business. In essence, I use a defined workflow for retouching — it gives me consistency, I don’t need to ‘think’ or re-invent the wheel every time and more importantly, it gives me a massive productivity boost when it comes to retouching.
How did it come about? Very simply, over the years I noticed a pattern. A repeating pattern of similar tasks that needed to be done for each and every image I worked on. Now, I’m a lazy retoucher, I admit it. I hate repeating things over and over again. Coming from a software engineering background I realised that this presented an opportunity for improvement. By mapping out the common steps I undertook for every image I started to define my retouch workflow. What’s more, for each step I looked at what the tools could do to help me with the heavy lifting. Lightroom and Photoshop both have the ability to offer some form of automation individually and when working together as a partnership. Leveraging this ability and combining it with my own presets, droplets and actions to initiate each step of my retouch workflow meant that I still retained complete creative control and could leave the tool to do the hard work. Lightroom and Photoshop drive the bus whilst I sit in the seat right behind the driver, giving directions and getting the best view in the house.
Does it stifle my creativity in retouch? No, quite the opposite in fact. I’d even go so far as to say it enhances it. It gives me more time to sit back and enjoy what I’m doing without remembering arcane steps and obscure techniques.
Can I deviate from the process? Absolutely. If a step isn’t necessary, I simply don’t use it. If I need to tweak it, I do. What it gives me is the stability that comes with a well trodden path coupled with the flexibility to go off piste whenever I choose.
Yesterday evening I finished the retouch and delivered the images to the client. 80 images in 20 hours equates to 15 minutes per image. That’s pretty good when retouching images to the level of the one of the beautiful Amy on this page. (Especially as one photographer I know takes 6 hours to do this same level of work – and that’s per image!)
There’s too much information about what I do and how I do it to share in a blog post so I’m going to make my whole high end beauty retouching process available for download as an ebook if I have enough interest.
Leave a comment and let me know. If there’s enough interest I’ll write it for you and ping you when it’s done.
(** if anyone can tell me what the UK equivalent of the senior portrait is, I’d be extremely grateful)
