PHOTOGRAPHY | RETOUCHING | EDUCATION
After more than 20 years as a photo retoucher and photographer, I’ve started to see that my skills are starting to be devalued. Retouching is increasingly getting outsourced overseas or replaced with AI for things like skin smoothening. Photography has been going through rapid changes for several years. The push towards AI-generated model shoots and CGI products is only going to accelerate as the technology improves.
With that in mind, I’ve been looking for a way to help future-proof my career. Some time ago, a friend recommended UX Design as a possibility. I started to look into the career, and I think it looks promising. Upon researching the attributes and skillsets one would need to succeed, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of my previous experiences would translate.
At the core of UX Design, is understanding what the customer wants and problem-solving a solution while remaining within the realm of what is possible. For years, I have been describing photo retouching with those exact same terms. For example, Better Homes and Gardens always wanted the white walls of an interior photo to be neutral, bright white with a touch of yellow to add some warmth. Of course, my managers didn’t want me to spend hours masking out the walls for every interior image in the entire magazine. So I needed to solve the problem of how to give the magazine the look they wanted while also figuring out how to do it quickly. I loved that part of the job.
Of course, there is a lot of learning in front of me. It’s going to be a long road. Thankfully there are a number of resources available online to help me on my way. I’m always open to hearing feedback and recommendations from others. Anyone reading this in the UX field, I’d love to hear from you!
I’ll continue to post updates as I go.
Now that the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar is over, I can share part of an incredible retouching project I was fortunate enough to have been involved.
For the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Coca-Cola wanted to create an advertising campaign around people around the world watching the matches while drinking Cokes from specially-produced cans and bottles. Because of the production timeline, it was impossible to have the bottles and cans produced in time for the photo shoots. The answer was to replace the existing products with 3D CGI renders.
The process involved taking the 3D renders, scaling to the proper size, adjusting the lighting to match the scene, and blending it into the photograph; this meant adding color casts, blurring to match the depth-of-field, adding condensation and bubbles as needed, and shadows. It simply was one of the most challenging retouching efforts I’ve done. Luckily, I worked with wonderful retouchers and project managers at INDG. I learned so much during that time and continue to learn more as I do additional freelance retouching with the company.
Below are some completed images and some before and after sliders.
A couple of years ago, I self-published a photography book about small-time mixed martial arts in Iowa. The process of getting there was fraught with unseen issues. One of which was achieving deep blacks while keeping the greys neutral (See: 50 Unwanted Shades of Grey).
Once it was ready to be released and shared with the world, I was ecstatic. More than five years of photography, editing, worrying about layout, and sequencing was over. I had created something substantial, and that would never change. Over the past year, the full understanding of what that meant became a bit more clear.
The forward was written by National Geographic photographer David Alan Harvey. Harvey also runs a photography blog called Burn Magazine, and he was the first to publish selections from early on in my project. In April, I pulled Fight Night off Amazon and removed references from my website after disturbing allegations against Harvey forced him to resign from Magnum photo agency.
I decided to re-release the book without the Harvey forward. I would simply replace the page of text with an additional photo. Unfortunately, the drive that stored the final edited photos and the book layout died. For the last several months, I have been searching for the original versions of the images, re-toning them, running the photoshop action to neutralise the greys, and re-linking the image into the layout. The process is almost complete, and it cannot come soon enough.
This is part of a series I will be writing about the process of making my photography book Fight Night, from stories about photographing events to the minutiae of trying to find a publisher, to the process of self-publishing. I hope you enjoy and learn a little something for your own personal projects.
I received my first copy of my Fight Night book from Blurb in the mail last week, and nearly every page had a distinctive color shift in the greyscale images. One page would be cool and blue, while the next page would have a distinctive pink cast. As excited as I was to hold a copy of my book that was ten years in the making, my heart sank at the inconsistent print quality. What follows is moderately nerdy on my part. You’ve been warned.
For those of you unfamiliar with what Blurb is, it is a platform that allows you to self-publish a book, then order as little as one copy at a time. The benefits of this are pretty obvious-no need to spend a massive amount of upfront money and fret about selling a giant inventory. Additionally, Blurb has paired with Amazon, so books can be ordered and sent to the customer automatically. It’s a pretty slick arrangement. There are some tradeoffs though. First, the per-unit cost is much higher is you are making one book at a time. Second, because Blurb is printing a wide variety of books at once, the quality of your particular book may suffer. But I had ordered books from there before and was reasonably pleased with the results.
Using just one-color black was never an option. The lack of ink density (I said I was going to get nerdy) would make the images look really weak. Because Blurb bulk prints multiple customers’ books at once, a spot channel black wasn’t an option either. So I used RGB to make sure there was sufficient ink density while keeping everything neutral. I converted the files to CMYK using the ICC profiles from the printer. When I got the proof book back, I quickly saw I was going to have to find another solution.
To make a long story short(er)I’m pretty sure I found a solution. I converted the RGB image to CMYK, and then remove the cyan, magenta and yellow from the highlight areas. Since the margin for error for a color shift is greater in the shadows, this should keep the image neutral. It also adds a bit more contrast to the images. I created an action and included it here. Enjoy.
The next step is to upload new files to the printer and wait for a new proof book. I’ll keep you updated.