Becoming a retouching god? How?

[Tareq]

I agree that if i need to be good in anything then i have to study, read, practice and give it time, there is nothing of quick magic method to learn, i was thinking i can learn photography in less than 1 year, but i found myself after 5 years that i just started now.

[PhiladelphiaPro]

You will have to do a lot of research and note taking. You have to build your retouching skills like a multi layered cake. If you value your time you probably won't want to spend it searching for free tutorials, you'll want to find retouchers who are already producing the quality of retouch that you're hoping to achieve and find out if they have a tutorial or instructional video for sale.

In my opinion it's going to take more than 1 tutorial or video before you build your own workflow. Retouching is more like a quilt, a patch here, a piece there; you get the picture?

You can buy plugs-in or actions that look like they're your ticket to success as a retoucher but I can tell you that time is your ticket to success. Plug-ins might help but they are not a one shot answer. You'll have to spend time understanding what you're looking to accomplish with a retouch, how to tackle the task, and which method(s) you're going to use to make your image the best it can be.

Godmother has a great retouching DVD. It saved me probably another year or two with searching for "free" avenues to reach a level of retouching that I was happy with. I recently picked up Karl Taylors retouching DVD's and they're pretty good too. Both tutorials are pretty informative but you'll need an intermediate level of photoshop knowledge beforehand.

Godmother will pretty much hold your hand throughout the whole video and never once says; "I'll fast forward or you'll get bored" - Personally I appreciated that. Karl Taylor fast forwarded a couple of times however he did it while never breaking the camera shot.

My final piece of advise is; if you think retouching is a quick process you'll probably just want to hire a retoucher because it's not! The more I learn about retouching, the longer I'm spending on an image to retouch it and I'm not taking longer because I don't know what to do. I'm taking longer because I want to fix everything - even if it's not warranted.

[Tareq]

So that i don't want to be a retoucher, i just want to photograph and let someone have all the time to do the retouching, i don't have full full week to do photography and then retouch, if i have long time to photograph a subject then i don't have time to retouch it, otherwise i have to shoot in less than 10 minutes and spend 1 day or longer to retouch.

I shoot sports, i ended up with more than 500 pics, the match is taking about 90-120 minutes, so how long time i need to retouch half of the match shots even they are not that difficult to retouch [each shot may take 5 min for editing]? if i am gonna retouch 200 shot each needs about 5 min then i need 1000 min, this is roughly about 16 hours, so that i just pick up about 10-20 best shots and play with them, i can imagine if i have 5 shots of one model and i have to retouch each for about 1-2 hours, so 5-10 hours is not short time, i have to save my time for one thing not many things.

[RobertAsh]

My approach to high image-count events is to first:

1. Cull out the losers and marginal shots. They're not worth working on.
2. If you can do an action or a preset on all of them to get them into decent, near-final or even final form, great. Use it.
3. Group the others into lighting groups (groups of images with the same lighting)
4. Do a first cut with DxO Optics Pro or Lightroom (or your tool of choice) with some initial adjustments or, better yet, presets. I do one in the group then copy those settings to the others.
5. Pick some best shots for further retouching.
6. Pick a smaller number of real stars for intensive retouching. These will be your banner images.

[Tareq]

Originally Posted by RobertAsh

My approach to high image-count events is to first:

1. Cull out the losers and marginal shots. They're not worth working on.
2. If you can do an action or a preset on all of them to get them into decent, near-final or even final form, great. Use it.
3. Group the others into lighting groups (groups of images with the same lighting)
4. Do a first cut with DxO Optics Pro or Lightroom (or your tool of choice) with some initial adjustments or, better yet, presets. I do one in the group then copy those settings to the others.
5. Pick some best shots for further retouching.
6. Pick a smaller number of real stars for intensive retouching. These will be your banner images.

This is what i do or did after few times on shooting something [sports, portraits, landscape,...], not worthy to work on over 100 shots to end up using only 5-10 shots for web or personal usage or sell or give to clients/friends,...etc,; i choose best of the best then just best as backups, if i need to add more then i can go back and add more of decent shots.