When retouching my images, I knew that I wanted to do quite minimal retouching and just focus on lifting the images and making them all more even. Chris put two tutorials on Aula using my images which was incredibly helpful, the first was using my ‘pride image’ and this had quite a lengthy retouching process to make the crown more golden. 

I started with my ‘pride’ images as the tutorial was fresh in my mind. Using photoshop, I used the camera raw retoucher to minorly adjust the highlight and shadows to brighten the image. I then opened the same image and brightened it to the extreme. I dragged the extreme one over the regular image, and went to the colour channels. I picked the blue channel as this created the most contrast, duplicated the blue channel and opened up curves. I created a very extreme ‘s’ curve to make the blacks very dark and the whites very bright. From here, I used the brush tool on ‘overlay’ at 50% opacity and flow, toggling between black and white to brush white over the white areas and black over the spokes of the crown. From here, I ‘command + clicked’ the blue channel to create a selection, before clicking back on the RGB channel. Then, back in the layers panel, I created a layer mask and hid the bottom layer, which showed me what was left from my selection. Using the regular brush I brushed away everything I didn’t want extremely bright, and on places where I wanted to keep a bit of the brightness (such as my face), I put the brush at 25% and gently brushed over that area to make it less extreme. 

I did this process to all 11 ‘pride’ images and I’m very happy with the outcome as they’ve really been lifted and the gold reads as gold now, whereas before it looked a bit muddy in some areas. 

The second tutorial was on listing the eyes, to make them stand out a bit more and really draw the focus. This was a pretty easy tutorial to follow, with simple steps to create a layer mask over the eyes and use curves to brighten just the eyes. I used this on every set of images as the eyes are really important. 

The shoots that needed the most ‘lift’ were the elf shoot, the greed shoot and the witch shoot, as these included extreme close ups which were quite flat. So I mainly used highlights and shadows, to really bring the image out and brighten it, as well as using the eye technique to brighten the eyes. I also did this on a few of the warrior shots that were quite dark, however even as I lifted the shadows I kept the blacks down for that one as I wanted the black eye makeup to remain quite deep. 

For close ups I also used the patch tool to remove any really noticeable blemishes, but I left the skin quite natural and didn’t really smooth it or remove texture.