Last updated 14th March' 07 : D White Last updated 14th March' 07 : D White 
I've seen the forum posts about "how do you do this technique" many times and I thought it would be good to give you my slant on what she does.
It's all taken from a post I stumbled across by Amy Dresser (www.amydresser.com) which describes 5 techniques which she uses. I'm going to try my best and show each of these 5 techniques and show you what they do. This tutorial is in no way endorsed by Amy and is purely my attempt at recreating what I 'think' she is doing.
I should add that I've only really just created this tutorial and it is 'a works in progress'. It may evovle over the next few moths.... it may not. Best check back anyway.
Amy retouches for many people, but I guess one of the most famous is Jill Greenberg (www.manipulator.com). I think it is very important to initially say that the photograph has to be very high quality with the right lighting for this technique
"What's right?" I hear you say. Well that's a matter of discussion, but suffice to say that Amy's techniques rely on increasing highlights and depthening shadow detail. So I'd say that these techniques wouldn't work great with a very flat image where highlights and shadows just wouldn't look natural. Remember that you are only enhancing what's there already.
That said, rules are there to be broken and I personally have came away with images using these techniques with less than ideal lighting.
I use two diffused beatuy dishes to both the left and right of the subject. I intentially spill the light onto a white background to wipe it out. Of course you can prevent spill and use whatever background you want. This is just the way I do it.
These two lights act as key lights providing plenty of highlighted skin to work on.
Next I use a nice large softbox positioned in front of your model to provide good fill light. How much is up to you and the mood of the shot you want. Ideally though it will be a few stops less than your key lights.
Fig 1. - Example Lighting Set-up
You should end up with some nice highlights on the skin. Here is the example shot of our lovely model Jelena P.
Notice the highlights to both the left and right of the model. This is what you are trying to get... at least a few decent highlights. We also have a nice catchlight in the eyes which make it look quite natural. The image below is exactly as shot in the camera. (Click here for a full version size. It's large at 5.5MB). Please feel free to download and practice on this image.
Remember your copyright laws and don't pass this off as your own. Please make sure you credit this to me.
Fig. 2 - Our start image
I have done absolutely nothing to this image. I've even left a dust spot to the upper left of the photo. Hard to see but it's there. If you do any curve adjustments you'll see it.
Before we go any further I'm going to add the beginning of Amy's transcript to see what we might do to the image at this point
| "Before i do any retouching...
I adjust the overall color of a photo (no point in retouching anything that will be blown out or hidden in shadows in the end). Most of my color adjustments are through curves (i adjust the individual channels) and an occasional hue/sat layer--- just personal taste. typically desaturate the reds a bit... as most peoples' flaws are reddish in nature, this diminishes some the areas vs. actual bumps. Also, i'm a bigger fan of desaturated images vs. saturated ones... i think i can control the shape of things better when i don't have to worry about weird saturation drop-offs. I usually work an image up in an all over and gradual manner... kind of general to specific. I refine color as i go along, carve features and remove blemishes sort of all at the same time. This way, if don't spend as much time as i'd like, the image should be fairly presentable if the deadline is sooner rather than later. Here are the general things i do: Rubber stamp out major stuff (on a copy of the original layer of course) at 100% on normal mode. I make sure that all the cloning i do is completely unnoticeable. No big blur blobs all over the place or step-marks. Not a fan of the healing brush either. Dodge and burn small light and dark spots and areas... anything that distracts and jumps out at me-- always set on midtones at about 3-4% with the fuzziest brush you got with "other dynamics" selected so the pen pressure is in effect. This is where i spend the bulk of my time. To speed this up, i have programmed the 2 buttons on my pen to be the short cuts for decrease brush size and increase brush size. Even out the skin tones to be basically the same hue, saturation through out a figure/face/image. i'll use the lasso with a fat amount feathering on it and circle/trace areas that i want to adjust. Again, i favor curves. These typically will be very subtle in nature... with the middle of a channel's curve just pulled up or down a notch or 2 |
These are fairly simple modifications so I'll not go into to much detail right now on the points above unless of course you guys ask for it!
One thing to mention before I go any further is that I do get rid of dust spots and run this skin Smoothing technique before I progress. Fix your image before progressing.
Now we are ready to have some fun.
