It might be interesting for those of us who do retouching professionally to trade interesting anecdotes. Not necessarily "my weirdest retouching assignment" or "my hardest retouching job", although those would be fine. I'm really looking for "my most interesting retouching assignment" or "my most rewarding retouching job". Or just any other retouching job related anecdotes.
This wasn't my hardest or even my weirdest, but it was surprising. I got a request to take a badly faded and color-shifted candid portrait of a mother and child against a wall, and move them to a nice park setting. And oh yeah, he wanted me to take an enormous pacifier out of the baby's mouth and replace it with...well, a mouth.
Fixing the fading and the color was pretty straightforward, as was moving them to a park setting, but I was having a devil of a time finding a good mouth for the baby. I tried finding baby shots in roughly the same pose, that at least vaguely resembled the baby in question, and then tried compositing just their smile onto my pacifierless baby (I decided she must be smiling).
After trying several different smiles I got desperate and threw out all preconceived notions about pose, lighting, exposure, style, even gender and race. I finally came up with an excellent smile that really looked nice, except it was from a baby of opposite gender and obviously different race. It took some massive correcting, but I finally got the skintones to match.
I didn't tell the client where I got the smile, but they were delighted with their new image.
This wasn't my hardest or even my weirdest, but it was surprising. I got a request to take a badly faded and color-shifted candid portrait of a mother and child against a wall, and move them to a nice park setting. And oh yeah, he wanted me to take an enormous pacifier out of the baby's mouth and replace it with...well, a mouth.
Fixing the fading and the color was pretty straightforward, as was moving them to a park setting, but I was having a devil of a time finding a good mouth for the baby. I tried finding baby shots in roughly the same pose, that at least vaguely resembled the baby in question, and then tried compositing just their smile onto my pacifierless baby (I decided she must be smiling).
After trying several different smiles I got desperate and threw out all preconceived notions about pose, lighting, exposure, style, even gender and race. I finally came up with an excellent smile that really looked nice, except it was from a baby of opposite gender and obviously different race. It took some massive correcting, but I finally got the skintones to match.
I didn't tell the client where I got the smile, but they were delighted with their new image.
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