Fashion and Beauty Retouching HELP!

[Layla Regan]

Hi,

I'm a photographer based in Manchester. I mostly do my own retouching but don't have the skills to get the effects I want. I love solve sundsbo, miles aldridge and mert and marcus's retouching but have no idea of how to get the skin to look clean but natural at the same time!

I am looking for advice, help and retouchers who want to test with me/bring their ideas to my work!

My work can be viewed at www.myspace.com/laylasailor

[pixelzombie]

can you supply some samples that show the look you're after?

[Frank Lopes]

I tried to view your work but couldn't...

Your site is... how should I put it? A little busy...

Originally Posted by Layla Regan

My work can be viewed at www.myspace.com/laylasailor

[cmi]

I am agree, its a busy site :S

[Layla Regan]

sorry about that, i'll pop some images and samples that i like a.s.a.p. Thanks for replying!

[Layla Regan]

Here you go, these are the types of looks i am trying to get if that helps!

Layla

[Frank Lopes]

Can we see what the photos looked like before the manipulations?

Originally Posted by Layla Regan

Here you go, these are the types of looks i am trying to get if that helps!

Layla

[pixelzombie]

it looks like you're after the pale "vogue" look...

[paulafrog]

I can help -- here's my site
http://www.webspawner.com/users/photochanges/index.html

Or you can email me at
paula_frog@yahoo.com

[annawj]

I've retouched many times for Solve Sundsbo, who is one of the world's best beauty photographers and supplies a fantastic quality of file to work from, which helps a lot, but the answer is that there are no shortcuts to this look.
You take at least a whole day per image, you perfect the skin using dodge/burn for hours at 100% zoom, you clean up all the hair strand by strand. All the different areas of the images are pathed out and masked so that each can be colour corrected independently.To smooth the skin tone you can add a solid color layer of the desired skin tone on about 20% opacity, but otherwise you do it the long way. Solve tends towards really creamy slightly desaturated skin so you'll need Hue and Saturation layers to take magenta out of the reds and adjust the yellows and probably desaturate both a bit. Try adding a curves layer set on luminosity mode and play around in the reds to lift the luminosity of the skin without losing detail.
General colour grads bring the whole image around to the desired look and help to blend the individual regions you've retouched into the final picture. Solve tends to prefer cooler shadows so try adding a little blue to the bottom of the curve while holding the top end to stop the colour from shifting overall.
Mert and Marcus are the same deal, they are famous in the industry for their shots being incredibly hard work for retouchers, in as much as they are extremely particular about colour and attention to detail. The work looks lovely at the end but it's never a quick process getting there.
You don't need a lot of really in depth knowledge of all of photoshop, as a professional retoucher I rarely use any adjustment layers other than curves, hue/saturation, colour fill layers and the occasional gradient map (I never used this method with Solve, but I use it a lot for creating overall color effects, try selecting a base colour and a highlight colour (start with dark blue base and pale yellow/pink highlight) and setting the layer to maybe soft light on 50% or colour on a lower opacity, play about to find what you like).
Tools wise I only really use dodge/burn/sponge, clone tool (especially good for evening out colour on skin - set it to color mode on a low opacity and clone gently over areas of patchy colour), healing brush occasionally, paths, eyedropper and the marquee tool.
Hope this helps!

[annawj]

forgot to mention that your solid colour layer at 20% on the skin should be set to 'color' mode.