Advanced Beauty Grading Part Four – Borrowing From Stills Retouching

I recently had a chance to jump back into the photography studio and take some head shots to help out a friend.

It was quite a fun situation as I was lighting, directing and re-touching the shoot myself so I would only have myself to blame when it was time for the grade and beauty work!

I struggled to get back into terms with the detail of working with stills after being in the video world so long.

I spend over 40 minutes just healing skin imperfections with the clone tool on one single frame!

With this in mind I thought it would be great to share my experiences and thoughts that I got from working with stills again.

In the next insight in this series I’ll be taking these micro level adjustments and techniques and trying to apply them to working with moving images again.

Techniques

In this insight I am doing advanced level photoshop work.

This is not an introduction to photoshop insight so apologies if I glossed over some quite advanced techniques but there was so much ground to cover even at this level of detail it still comes to over 15mins long!

If you would like to check out some of the techniques I used here are some free videos I’d recommend that you watch to get a more in detail look at these tools.

Healing Brush

Dodging And Burning

High Pass Filter

Layer Masks