Chapter 14. Solving Special Portrait Retouching Problems

Even though the kinds of problems solved by retouching run the gamut, much of the focus in the retouching world today is in portrait retouching. In the next chapter, we'll work together retouching a standard business portrait. During that project, we'll go through the entire portrait retouching workflow from scan to print. However, we won't encounter several special issues while working on that project — issues like swapping heads, replacing missing eyes, and smoothing wrinkled clothing. Photographers and retouchers often ask me about how to handle these special kinds of challenges, so I decided to devote a chapter to the most common ones.

By now, you should be getting a good feel for the tools and techniques used in this book. This chapter shows you how to use some of those familiar tools and techniques to solve some difficult problems. Because the goal of this chapter is to share my overall strategies for dealing with these issues, I don't focus closely on the details of every step. Instead, I show you how a group of similar concepts are used to solve a variety of common retouching problems. We begin with a technique that sounds extreme, but is often one of the easiest — swapping heads.

Swapping Heads

Back in the olden days, when photographers were shooting film, the option of switching someone's head from one image to another ...

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