How much retouching is allowed?

The beauty of photography is that everybody is able to express him or herself as an individual. There is no right or wrong. It is just about the photographer getting his message across in a very captivating way. If we see it like this, there should really be no rules about how much retouching is allowed in photography. A photographer can never make a good picture out of a bad one. But there is always room to make a great picture out of a good one. So for me, retouching a picture is part of the process of creating an image. You just have to do it in a very professional way. And it is the job of the photographer to retouch his own images. (And if you give your images out for retouching, it should be to somebody who understands you and your work.) In Portrait Photography the discussion of retouching-yes-or-no can even be more controversial, because you want your subject to look good but at the same time it should be like his natural self. Here are some tips on how to enhance your portrait picture without taking it too far: Step1: It is allowed to remove spots. Your subject has a bad skin day. But does it mean that the person has to carry those spots in the picture for the rest of his life? With the healing brush tool in photoshop you can easily remove spots which would have most likely vanished the next day anyway. Step2: Wrinkles Wrinkles are a sign of age. So if you are photographing a 40 year old, don’t let the person look like 25. Let him look like a well aged 40 year old. You can remove crows feet and laugh lines with healing brush in photoshop. Step3: Eyes With age the white in our eyes becomes darker and more yellowish. Also red veins start to appear. So to brighten up your subjects eyes will help a lot, to make him look younger. Select the eyes with the Lasso Tool with a feather radius of 1 or 2 pixels. With the control Image ?Adjustments ?Hue/Saturation you can try and reduce the density of the red veins. Further you can go to Image?Curves and brighten up the white of the eyes. Step4: Skin Even under the strongest air conditioning in Nigeria we still tend to have an oily skin. It has to do with our high level of humidity. We are now coming to the point that people like to call “airbrushing” a picture. Create a new layer (make a copy of the image first. mistakes can happen fast) and use the brush tool. Select the color of your subject’s skin by pressing the alt-key. Now paint with the brush tool on the new layer and cover all oily areas. Brush opacity should not be more than 20 -25 Percent. Since you painted on a separate layer you can later reduce the opacity of that layer, if you feel the retouching effect is too strong. It is important that the skin still looks like skin after this process. It has to have pores and structures to look real and natural. When I retouch skin I always stay for away from softeners. These steps are just the basics of photo editing. If you need more illustrative tips go online. There you will find a lot of photoshop tutorials. But the answer to “how much retouching is allowed” you will not find there. That is your prerogative as a photographer.