Almost all business headshots and other portraits need to be retouched. This is often done to fix mistakes the photographer made or to repair something that was overlooked such as a crooked tie. Being neatly groomed will make you appear more competent.
Portrait retouching for business headshots is not about vanity. It’s actually good business marketing. Having even skin tones, a nice smile, and sparkling eyes will make you look healthier, which makes you more attractive, which helps you appear friendlier and trustworthy. This is exactly the impression you want to make with a business headshot.
The success of any retouching depends on the original image. The old saying “garbage in, garbage out” means that the quality of the output is determined by the quality of the input. If your original photo has reasonable focus and resolution, and it was more or less properly lit, then the retouching results should be excellent. But if your original picture is very blurry, has low resolution, or was horribly exposed, then the retouching results may be disappointing.
I recently retouched a number of family portraits that an inexperienced photographer made with his new camera and flash. He wasn’t familiar with the camera settings and the pictures were slightly out of focus, the colour was noticeably off, the compositions were crooked, the eyes were dark, and all the photos were very overexposed. But the saving grace was that the high resolution photos were shot in a raw image format. The photographer and his customer were very happy with the retouched images.
Someone last week asked me to retouch or, to be more accurate, to salvage three pictures taken at night, with an 11-year-old cellphone, that used only a streetlight for illumination. The pictures were very dark, out of focus and very low resolution. I tried a few techniques but the results were terrible.
Artificially Intelligent Retouching
It’s difficult to see at this size but manual techniques were better at removing stray hairs, fixing small gaps in the hair, brightening eyes behind the glasses, removing eyeglass reflections, removing shadows from the eyeglass frames, fixing small gaps between teeth, removing flash highlights on the teeth, and shaping the eyebrows and eyes. Also an open button hole and some button stitching were removed.
The manual retouching took a leisurely 45 minutes. In a hurry, I could’ve done it in under 30 minutes. The AI retouching took two or three minutes.
Manual retouching is good for targeting unique objects such as eyeglasses, jewellery, buttons, zippers, fashion accessories, clothing details, facial hair, crooked ties and collars, hands, fingers, ears, etc. AI retouching is good for retouching skin, reshaping some facial features and smoothing wrinkled clothes and photo backgrounds.
AI retouching software works very well when the photo suits the software. But if there are unique objects, the person is in an uncommon pose, the person’s face is partially hidden, or anything else that makes the portrait not average, then the AI may have trouble. Manual retouching works with any photo.
AI retouching is certainly good enough if you don’t need absolute perfection. Most (all?) AI retouching software is designed to retouch human portraits. Manual retouching is needed to retouch photos of animals or inanimate objects.
The best method now for retouching portraits is to use AI software to get most of the retouching done in minutes. Then use manual techniques to retouch unique details and anything else that the AI missed. AI software is really changing portrait retouching.
