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Our Portfolio of Digital Retouching
This is our portfolio of digitally retouched photographs.
We've used Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to improve both digital
and scanned photographs by adding elements, removing
elements, or enhancing the overall quality of the image.
Click on any image to see a larger version.
Common Questions About
Digital Image Retouching
What program and equipment do you use? We use
Photoshop with a Wacom graphics tablet for most of the image
enhancements. How do you decide if an image needs enhanced?
Most images can be improved. Colors may be off a little,
contrast can be improved , or shadows can be reduced. Some
very poor images can be salvaged, and good images can be made even
better with digital retouching. Many of the images that we use
in websites are improved using a variety of techniques. How
do you blend images? Many of the images shown here are
layered and blended images. It's more visually interesting to
blend several images and it is an effective use of space on a web
page. When working in Photoshop, images are combined in
layers. A tool called Layer Masks allow you to erase part of a
layer to show the layer beneath. How do you remove
objects from a picture? Removing objects from an image is
usually done with a Clone Tool. Technically, you don't remove
part of the image - you paint another part of the image over the
object you want to take out. For example if you want to remove
the telephone lines from the sky, you paint sky over the telephone
lines. There are several examples of cloning in the images
above. How long does it take? Many digital photo
manipulations take just a few minutes, others can take hours.
It depends on the quality of the source image, and the quality of
the results. For example, images created for the web are of a
lower quality than images created for a high quality print.
How can you tell if an image has been enhanced?
Sometimes you cannot tell that an image has been enhanced.
There are signs that you can look for.
- Odd proportions
- Mismatched lighting - shadows from different angles
- Odd repeated patterns of pixels
- Changes in perspective
- Jagged pixels between sections
If a photo is expertly manipulated, it's unlikely that an
average view would ever be able to tell. There is a
growing industry of experts who study images to determine if
they have been manipulated. Are there ethical
considerations when editing a picture? Yes, we think
there are limits to what you should manipulate - unless you
disclose that the image has been manipulated. We are
willing to manipulate images to improve them - as long as it
does not change the meaning of the image or misrepresent a
product.
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