"How much Photoshop do you do?"

We have decided this week to pick a topic for our blog post and use this forum to start answering some questions that we get almost everyday from clients. Our headshot clients are always asking us about retouching and how much we do to our images. The answer is "not much".

It is important to get the image the way you want it in the camera by doing things from using good lighting to having a good makeup artist on hand. For commercial and theatrical headshots, the following things are important:

1. That your headshots look like you and not your super model brother or sister.
2. That your headshots look natural.

You don't want to go in to a casting and have the casting director look from your headshot to you and go "Ummmm...I want the girl that is in the picture...can you go get her for me?"

Here are a couple of examples of our retouching for recent clients:


In this image we used some extra lighting from off to the side to create a nice direction to the light that still looked natural. When we pulled the image up on the computer, we used photoshop to increase the color a little, brighten up the eyes sharpen it and darken down the background a little to draw attention to her beautiful face. Most importantly she still looks natural and exactly like the same person:



In this next image, we were shooting outside again, and just like before we used some extra studio lighting to give the light a natural look and direction. The client in this image, Jean, takes really good care of his skin as you can see so there weren't really many blemishes to remove, but like lots of us hard workers he had some dark circles under his eyes. We lightened those circles up a little and used photoshop to boost the color and contrast of the image, sharpen it and darken the background.


Getting the image right in the camera is the photographer's job, and using too much photoshop can make the image look fake or "airbrushed". For some types of photography, like band promos and commercial advertising, lots of image enhancement is not only a good thing, but it's expected in the industry, but for commercial and theatrical headshots, that's not the case. Here are your tips this week for preparing for your headshots:

1. Take care of your face: get a facial four or five days ahead of time and get in to some kind of skin care regiment. If you are an actor, your face is what gets you work so take care of it.

2. Get a professional make-up artist for your session. If your friend is just "so totally awesome at make up stuff" run for your life. A professional make-up artist knows how to make you look your best while still looking natural. Getting makeup for headshots is totally different than getting makeup done to go out clubbing. Most men can get away without a makeup artist, but we do recommend that you guys get a good powder to keep your shiny foreheads at bay.

3. Know your demographic (young moom, street thug, girl next door) and make sure to bring clothes to your session that will enforce those looks for you. And remember that you can probably pull of several different looks so plan ahead and bring lots of choices.

That's it for now, we are going to have a ton of stuff to show all you guys in the next couple of weeks, we have a ton of photo shoots planned as well as a BBQ for all our clients this summer (shhhhh....don't tell Julie I told you).