Almost all professional portraits and business headshots require retouching. Photographers typically do this to correct technical mistakes or fix overlooked details like a crooked tie.
Retouching your business headshot isn’t about vanity. It’s smart business marketing.
When a photo shows even skin tones, a genuine smile, and sparkling eyes, it makes you look healthier and more attractive. This, in turn, makes you appear friendlier and more trustworthy. This is the exact impression you want to convey in a professional setting.
The Starting Point
The success of any retouching starts with the original image. As the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out”: the quality of the final result is determined by the quality of the input.
If your original photo has reasonable focus and resolution and was more or less properly lit, you can expect excellent retouching results. However, if the picture is very blurry, low-resolution, or very over or underexposed, the final retouched image may be disappointing.
I recently retouched a number of family portraits taken by an inexperienced photographer. The pictures were slightly out of focus, the colour was noticeably off, the eyes were dark, and the photos were very overexposed. The saving grace was that he shot the high-resolution images in a raw format. This meant that I could recover a lot of details and get good results.
By contrast, another person asked me to salvage three photos taken at night with an 11-year-old cell phone, using only a streetlight for illumination. The pictures were extremely dark, out of focus, and very low resolution. I tried a few techniques, but the results were terrible.
Manual vs. Artificially Intelligent (AI) Retouching
The manual retouch took a leisurely 45 minutes, (I could have done it in under 30 minutes if I were in a hurry). But the AI retouching only took two or three minutes.
Manual portrait retouching excels at targeting unique objects like eyeglasses, jewelry, buttons, zippers, fashion accessories, facial hair, clothing details, and adjusting eyes, hands and ears.
AI retouching works well for smoothing skin and evening out skin tones, and smoothing wrinkled clothes and photo backgrounds.
AI software performs effectively when a photo suits the software’s parameters. However, the AI may struggle if the portrait is not average, if it contains unique objects, an uncommon pose, or a partially hidden face. Manual retouching works with any photo.
If you don’t require absolute perfection, AI retouching is certainly good enough. Since most (if not all) AI software is designed for human portraits, you still need manual retouching for photos of animals or inanimate objects.
The current best method for portrait retouching is to use AI software to complete most of the work in minutes. Then, apply manual techniques to retouch unique details and anything the AI missed. AI software is truly transforming portrait retouching.
More information on my photo retouching services.
