Advanced Retouching Techniques

If you search online for images using the word 'retouching' you'll get thousands of results—mostly of women. This illustrates a very misogynistic view on how women 'should' appear in the public eye - you'll find a good few images of men as well, also retouched to the point where both sexes appear like giant Ken and Barbie dolls, over-processed and completely lacking in any individual character.

But retouching is not just about correcting the human form's perceived shortcomings, however misguided that concept might be. It's also about performing simple tasks like removing litter from a landscape that you'd not noticed when on location, it's about correcting seriously warped perspective created when shooting with a wide-angle lens, it's about re-presenting an image to create a different look. To fully retouch any image, you can use one or, more often, a range of retouching and manipulation...