Photo Fix

     In this post I would now like to go into one of the most valuable and sought after skills that a photographer can possess.  The process that I am referring to is what used to be called airbrushing, or touching-up of facial features.  We’ve all seen the photos of beautiful movie stars and models like Bar Rafaeli on the covers of magazines who appear to have flawless complexions and perfectly toned bodies.  Then some sneaky paparazzi manages to catch them going out to the grocery store or gas station appearing haggard and worn down by life, in other words like the rest of us poor mortals.  For sure makeup and plastic surgery play a tremendous role in this transformation, but these fixes don’t always cover everything up and plastic surgery is a bit drastic, and that is where photographic touch up comes in.
     As I said, years ago photo enhancement and touch up was done by a process called airbrushing which actually entailed the use of a detail paint spray gun that is capable of spraying very fine amounts of photographic dye onto the photo in order to cover up human frailties. This technique was among other things slow, unforgiving of errors, and required an individual with no small amount of artistic talent to do the application.  I don’t know about you but the talent thing would have left me out right off the bat since I have trouble even spelling “artistic talent” much less possessing it.
     Today both professional and amateur shutter bugs have it much easier due to the development of photographic enhancement software.  What used to be called airbrushing is now called the “glamour effect” which sounds so much nicer than airbrushing which brings to mind images of the auto
collision repair business, not photography.  No one wants to look back at their wedding photos and remember that they had a severe attack of acne going on, or that barbeque stain on the brides wedding dress that got there when her husband’s best man spilled a plate of wings on her.  None of these small tragedies need worry you anymore due to the magic of digital imaging and photo enhancement software, too bad too, that clumsy best man might still be alive if you had known that the barbeque stain could be filtered out of the wedding photos.
    The two programs that I like to use the most are again Corel Paintshop Pro, and Adobe Photoshop Elements.  Both are capable of amazing results when you know what filter to apply, for instance Photoshop has a “Spot Healing Brush Tool” that does an amazing job on blemishes, scars, acne, or any other skin malady.  Paintshop Pro has the same kind of tool which they call “Scratch Remover” under the clone brush tool icon.  Maybe I am just not used to Photoshop, because for quick touch up and overall settings I much prefer Paintshop Pro.  For one thing it has overall control elements like skin smoothing, noise removal, fill light and clarity, vibrancy, and numerous other camera type controls that are geared more to the overall enhancement of photos.
     One more thing to consider is the price of course.  For the time being Corel is still selling its products at a fixed price, which in most cases is quite reasonable.  Adobe on the other hand has moved into the Clouds, and I mean that literally, as far as I can tell adobe products like Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, Lightroom, and Premier are moving away from retail pricing to monthly cloud fees (which like a visit from your mother-in-law) go on forever and all your work is conducted on the Adobe servers.  While this type of access appeals to some, I really don’t care for it since it requires you to be connected to the internet in order to work, and besides that not always being possible, it also opens your private computer to hacking if the host gets hacked.
     Whatever program you decide to use as always take the time to learn it to the best of your ability, you might try video servers like Youtube, and Vimeo where a wealth of tutorials can be found.