What's involved in retouching portraits?

There are many things that can be done to a photograph to enhance its look, from removing blemishes to completely replacing an entire face. In the photography biz, we call it retouching.

The key to successful retouching is moderation. With digital retouching, photographers weild a tool powerful enough to turn any face into so perfect a picture, that the picture ceases to be the person who sat in front of the camera. For many people, their crooked noses, frizzy hair, facial moles, uneven eyebrows or chubby cheeks are integral parts of their visual character, and could be said to form a part of their personality. It's crucial in producing a portrait for a photography to balance looking beautiful with looking genuine.

Having said that, there's nothing wrong with neating things up a bit, and here are just a few ways in which we can:

Skin with excessive texture or irregularity can be smoothed and softened using digital airbrushing. Similar to real airbrushing, digital airbrushing is a slow, gradual process of smoothing and blurring parts of the skin. For portraits, most retouchers blend their airbrushed photos with their originals, to avoid an obvious "plastic" look, common in fashion magazines.

Blemishes such as pimples, moles and scars can be removed by a process called "cloning". Healthy parts of skin are copied over the blemished parts, with their tones adjusted to fit the surrounding area seamlessly. Stray hairs, stains on clothing, holes from old piercings and even food in teeth can be removed using the same method.

Everyone should have bright eyes. Digitally isolating a subjects eyes and increasing their gamma (gamma is similar to brightness) can greatly enhance the impact of a portrait. Similarly, the irises can be isolated and their colour intensified, or even changed completely - better than contact lenses! The same isolation techniques can be used to whiten teeth, shade cheeks and even change hair colour.

Another amazing retouching technique is re-shaping. Almost like the photo was made of clay, we can bend, squish, prod and mould photos to achieve all sorts of remarkable results, from thinning cheeks and thighs to curving and toning muscles. Re-shaping also allows us to even up uneven eyebrows, eyes, lips, teeth and sideburns.

Digital make-up is a nice way of enhancing the work of a good makeup artist, or replacing one completely! Combining selective colour adjustments with softening and enhancing techniques, we can produce digital lipstick, blush, foundation, eyeshadow, eyeliner and even mascara. The non-destructive "layered" process of digital retouching allows us to apply these effects, then reduce or increase them until the perfect balance of colour and definition is achieved.

Is digital really better than film?

Film is preferred by many photography veterans - ultimately, for its imperfections.

Film has a grain, non-linear luminance response and colour separation which many people have become familiar with and somewhat attached to, and so these people will miss it in digital. But this is, quite simply, where it ends.

There was a time when digital cameras were unable to match the sharpness and colour response of film. Happily, those days are long gone.

Many digital cameras are equipped with 35mm sensors so that, when used with the same lenses as 35mm film cameras, the resulting image geometry is identical, whilst the sharpness (or resolution) and dynamic range (or contrast) are far superior.

Digital cameras also offer numerous advantages to cost and workflow, such as eliminating the timely and expensive procedure of film development, and providing photographers with instant feedback for exposure and depth of field.

Helium Studios shoot on only the best digital cameras, ensuring results of the highest possible quality.

Why are studio flash lights so blinding?

Put simply, having more light produces better photos.

It's quite feasible to take photos without flash lights. People do it all the time - on mobile phones, outdoors and even with video cameras (video cameras simply take 50 photos every second and play them back in rapid succession).

However, mobile phones and video cameras produce photos in an entirely different league to studio portraits. They tend to only perform reasonabley when used outdoors - where sunlight is many times brighter than the light produced by our modest halogen or fluorescent lights. Indoors,they use a combination of high gain and long exposure to compensate for low light.

High gain digitally "amplifies" the digital signal being recieved from the camera's sensor. In doing so, it also amplifies the sensor's imperfections (or "noise floor"), resulting in a noisey or "grainy" look.

Long exposures increase brightness by exposing the sensor for more time. This is a great method for still subjects, but if the subject OR camera move during the exposure, the subject is recorded in all its positions at once, creating a smeared "motion blur" effect - not too pleasing for your average portrait!

The third method which can be used to overcome low light is opening the camera's aperture. The aperture is the hole between the lense and the camera's sensor. Opening the hole allows more light to get through, but with one downside: a reduced focal depth (or "depth of field"). Wider apertures require more precise focussing, and can narrow the focal depth to the point where if a subject's eyes are in focus, their nose and ears will be too blurry to print.

Ideally, photographers want to have a very small aperture to ensure good focus of their subjects, fast exposure to avoid motion blur, and low sensitivity to minimise noise from excessive gaining. Since all three methods of overcoming low light conflict with this ideal, we rely on a forth method - flash lights!

A constant light source of the same brightness as a flash light would virtually blind anyone in front of it, not to mention turn any studio into an oven - and that's if there were actually enough electrical energy available to run them! An average studio flash head emits in around 1/250th of a second what a 500 watt bulb emits in one second. That's a whopping 125,000 watts of brightness!

Flash lights deliver enormous bursts of light for just long enough to capture a good photograph, without compromising any aspects of image quality.