best way to learn product retouching

[mattp]

Hi all,

I am an amateur (but in my opinion quite competent) still life and product photography who wants to learn the best techniques for pro-level product retouching. Can anyone recommend any good sources of information? I.e websites, books or dvd's.

Thanks
Matt

[Wyk]

- This very place has lots of amazing information for a start. Look around. I'm sure you'll find loads that will come in handy to you.
- Also check devART (http://www.deviantart.com). There are lots of amazing tutorials and guides there too.
- Go through basic Photoshop tutorials too. Knowing them can be of great help while retouching an image.
- Try and contact retouchers and photoshop experts who will help you out now and then with places where you get stuck.

[shumicpi]

Hi,
There are a lot of photo retoucing technique and a lot of tutorial to retouch photos in photoshop. I can give you some link of such tutorial which is helpful for the beginners.

http://sixrevisions.com/photoshop/26...ing-tutorials/

http://clippingpathspecialist.com/ph...-tutorial.html

And finally still you have problem with your photos then you can contact with the expert photo retoucher.

Best of luck.

Thanks

[Sagoana]

Dvd lessons with Chris Orwig from lynda.com

[MacBurg]

A lot starts in camera and with lighting, work in a well controlled environment where you don't have colour casts, calibrate your camera and shoot white balance/colour checker cards for accurate colour results. A lot of products are difficult to light in one shot due to reflections and their small size, so you can shoot composite shots with a change in lighting to highlight certain areas of the product.

If you are shooting composites start your edit by bringing in the different shots and masking them. A basic workflow in photoshop would be to remove any unwanted marks or spots on the product and clean up your lighting reflections. After this I will spend a while making masks for various areas that need there own corrections or enhancements, even down to pixel level brush work to select lettering on labels. This is so that you can really enhance the contrast and sharpness of text on labels and also even out their colours and to match the colours on the original product.

I think the biggest thing to learn is how to create accurate selections as these are used to create masks will be used repeatedly throughout an edit. Some selections can be used temporarily too, to blur/sharpen a certain area more than another area within a mask, to help with retouching when your dealing with straight edges or tricky details. Spend good time learning this as a lot of other things in photoshop rely on them.

[Wittz]

Doug ran a rebroadcast of the Live show with Product retouching with Carrie Beene a few weeks ago. I know it's one of the show that won't be on rental. So may be Doug will run another show soon. Check out the live show section, and make a request maybe.

http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/retouchpro-live/