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Curious how many of us retouch our photos. How many of us attempt to take 10 years or so off our best poses. It’s a topic near and dear to me as I’ve made a career working behind a camera. What have our girls found to be the best software to work with. For those ladies who have not attempted this may I offer some thoughts. The industry standard is Adobe Lightroom and for our purposes is perfect for softening those wrinkles, adjusting color and brightness, maybe you got bright red nail polish on that favorite black skirt (guilty). Lightroom can fix all of those and many more and it’s relatively simple to learn. Just follow along one of the thousands of online tutorials. The feature I appreciate the most is the ability to create “masks” or in simpler terms, to detect perfectly any feature of a photo, like a face. Once detected, which it does instantly, you can then modify just the face, leaving the rest of the photo unchanged. There are sliders for adjustments too many to name. At least in my case, I’m 69, I go right for the clarity and texture sliders. I would love to say no more wrinkles but I can’t, but there are a lot less wrinkles and shadows and there is no question I look better with my face softened. From there it’s just fun to play with all the looks you can achieve without distorting the picture to the point it’s comical.
Any thoughts on photo retouching? If anyone would like some coaching I’m happy to help.
Robyn
I do a lot of photography but I am definitely 'old school' when it comes to re-touching. I learnt the craft in the early seventies when I exclusively used B&W film which I developed and printed myself. I preferred the taking of, and the looking at photographs and spent as little time in the darkroom as I could, therefore any alteration to the image consisted of some cropping, some exposure changes and a little bit of dodging and burning and that was that. Moving into the modern day and nothing much has changed. I use Lightroom and carry out the same manipulation as I did with film i.e. not much. I don't like re-touched images, I have Photoshop (as part of my package) but never use it. The picture you see is pretty much the picture I took, warts and all.
In the end, by re-touching pictures of oneself, who is being fooled, other people, or just oneself? Any picture I post here is pretty much what the camera saw when I took it (subject to quality improvements listed above).
I have seen some of these apps being used by friends and the differences are amazing. Like Rebecca I am old school and did some black and white photography and development there. I have a Kodak picture thing on my computer which is years old. It crops and does simple functions which is fine by me. I have a phone camera as you do and also carry a digital camera. I just use lighting and the flash when taking pictures so my images are as any one would see me which is how I want it. I have lived in the real world too long and the virtual world scares me.
I am amazed at how any picture can be altered and see a new generation who rely on this to create an image which is not them and no wonder there are those who have issues.
Working on Linux, I don't have too many choices of software available on my computer. I use the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (also known as GIMP, with Gnu, being a recursive acronym meaning Gnu's not Unix, and is pronounced g'new and not new).
It is a powerful program, but not always intuitive. I use it for basic functions like altering the white balance, changing brightness and contrast, red eye removal, and scaling the images for the web (usually no larger than 800x600 pixels).
Altering my photos is something that allows me to live out my fantasy. I have more artistic freedom to do something with my appearance.
Reality can sometimes be disappointing. That doesn't change the fact that I sometimes find my real reflection in the mirror beautiful enough. It happens. 🙂
I've tried this with a few photos to look younger / older, different hair length etc, its a bit of fun and the results are quite interesting and I end up resembling a female relative. On one of the options to look older I ended up looking like my mum who is in her 80s.
I play with saturation and lighting but I don't often edit myself. I will sometimes edit the background cause I don't have a great place to take photos at
Hi Robyn, I too have worked behind the camera professionally and seen the stars of Vegas without their makeup and magic lenses. So, I know that anybody can look great. However for my own pics, I just want to see what the world sees and so I only crop and adjust brightness or darkness on any of my pics that I usually take on my iPhone as video. If you see my picture it is all really me without any additional magic. I had and have tons of editing software at my disposal but don't use them on myself. I hope this helps. Marg
Being a commercial photographer for 30+ years I've been using Photoshop and Lightroom for many years. I think I started with LR version 2. For my own photos I tend not to do much but color correct, exposure, sharpen & crop. I have played with a program called PortraitPro Studio and it can do amazing things from reshaping the face, smoothing skin, changing hair color, adding makeup & more.
I've done a few pictures of me with it but I always label them that enhancing software was used. Strictly as a fantasy of what I could look like.
I probably ought to just take the Fifth on this one, but I love the topic and I'm glad you spoke to specific things like clarity and texture (or in my world, structure). Even without an editing suite you can also smooth out appearance simply by overexposing or using a high ISO and applying some noise reduction. I've seen a few past forum discussions about image editing get pretty judge-y and its stopped me from sharing much on this. Over the years I have come to think that the post-processing steps with digital are as much a part of making the image as pushing the shutter on the camera itself. Its one of those ironies of technology where it made things harder rather than easier--the trade off for getting more power is that it requires more time.
The special sensibility among CD's on this topic is well placed but sometimes overlooks that we were making many of the same choices to influence how we appear in images in the pre-digital era, they were just baked into the products we bought or the techniques we used setting the shot up, rather than us getting to make some of those choices after the fact. For many years I shots thousands of rolls of prints and slides and my mindset was always that photographic talent was all about getting it right on the front end, because unless you are doing your own darkroom work, what you get back after you push the button is final. Being in that mindset made me very disappointed with digital when I finally converted over to it, and nothing looked like what I thought it should look like or what I had tried to make it look like. That effect, and how many types of images I could get almost as good and much more easily with a phone, actually dampened my interest in big-camera photography a bit until I came around to the idea that unlike film the image sitting in the camera is still part raw material instead of being 100% finished product.
Is it easy to take things too far? of course, but a trained eye will detect what is unnatural or overbaked in any image, and as it relates to CD photos specifically, indulging too much becomes self defeating if you ever want to exist in a genuine social setting. What I find interesting is it that its actually far faster and more intuitive to over-edit an image on my phone than it is in the editing suite that I use. The stuff that takes me an hour in an editing suite, the phone does automatically in the time it takes me to lower my hand from where I am holding it for that studio-mode selfie. Posting that image without making any changes to it doesn't mean I can honestly say "I never edit my images, you only see the real me!". With my big- camera shots the editing suite slows me down and makes me think about my choices and more importantly my own eye and my own memory. No matter what editing choices I make, being true to my memory is what really matters.
The topic of photo retouching is important in a couple of ways for me. As a photographer, I appreciate the level of control that digital offers. That being said, I shoot RAW files (these contain lots of information and usually lack contrast and saturation) and really only adjust brightness, color, and contrast to bring the image back to its original levels. Or to the original levels that my eyes perceived, at least. I don't do any editing to pics taken with my phone.
When I started CDing, I used much more manipulation, even adjusting the shape of my face and body to match the picture I had of who I thought I wanted to be. Once I accepted that I was beautiful all on my own, I began only making those minor adjustments.
Now, of course, I love to choose the good angles as much as the next girl 😉 but I think it's important to be honest with ourselves about how we actually look. In looking at Reddit, I feel like the goal for many CDs is to look as "hot" and desirable as possible. I suppose this is natural as we wrestle with accepting ourselves and trying to learn to love our less-than-supermodel selves.
(That got a little deep for a question about photo retouching)