How to retouch a photo by Alberto Ruiz
A photoshoot takes a lot of time. So much that time is running out, and optimizing it is our priority to get the job done quickly, well, and efficiently.
That is precisely what Alberto Ruiz, a colleague in the retouching team at Freepik, is going to tell us about today, and who every day faces endless sessions with photos to perfect so that they reach the user ready to use.
In this case, Alberto has received 458 photos from a session and has kept 86, making a meticulous selection. But normally many more photos come out of the same session, so
how can we select those that are useful for us?
Thanks to the stars. We can first filter with one and follow up with 3 or 4 that indicate the top photos of the session.
The next step is to route the photo for final retouching with Photoshop, thanks to general adjustments that almost all photos need to a greater or lesser extent.
To save time in this step, we can copy and paste the adjustments between one photo and another with Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V and then adjust the small details that remain to be resolved.
We will duplicate the layer to get a backup and start editing to ensure we can go back at any time.
💡 Tip! Select the patch and right-click + content-aware. This is what the healing brush tool does but in a much more precise way.
Don’t worry about being too accurate with the mask because you can still correct it later.
💡 Tip! Remove those annoying yellows from your pictures, increasing the blue tones.
💡 Tip! You can also use the burn tool (20%, 30%, or 40%) to soften attention to a particular point in the photo.
With still life and model photos, we aim to make the object/main subject stand out above all the other elements. To do this, we must give it depth and focus the weight on the essential point of the photograph.
For example, in this case, the sky has a lot of visual weight, so with the selecting wand, we will lower the saturation and bring it to the colors we are looking for.
As for the subject, we will select it with the subject selection tool, adjust it with quick selection or lasso, and then touch the levels looking for more presence.
💡Tip! Lower the reds of the skin for more naturalness but exclude the lips from your selection.
Apply all these tips for a quick touch-up in your sessions – it’s a matter of automating it and optimizing every second!
