Editing & Retouching Your Headshots
Rockville, Maryland, Professional Headshot Photography
You Can Photoshop That Right?
If there is one thing I hear a million times, it’s “You can Photoshop that right?”
Let’s talk about retouching your headshots. Number one, retouching should never be a way of fixing something that can be dealt with in the studio. Sometimes we can tweak our lighting or poses to fix small issues. I want to get it right in camera as much as possible.
Sometimes though there’s just that one thing that got missed and everything else is so perfect that I don’t want to tempt it. That expression is so killer that I’ll fix the fly-away hairs in post. But, most of the time, a quick scan through the viewfinder and I’ll catch it before we hit the shutter button.
Clothes Wrinkles And Fly-Away Hairs
I strongly urge you to have your outfits chosen, dry-cleaned, and pressed before your headshot session. This will be really helpful to keep your clothes looking sharp during your session. Men, I see this often. I’ve had male clients walk in with a backpack and tell me they have 5-6 dress shirts in there. I’ll get the iron out for you and go make coffee. Please, bring them on hangers. Sometimes we get a little wrinkle or fold in the shirt at the collar and it just won’t straighten out, or, there are little stains on there. These can be sent to my retoucher to be dealt with.
Fly away hair is another common issue. I encourage you to bring hair spray or flyaway gell to your session. I have some here if you forget. But even on the best shoots, there is always a few hairs that get away. These are easy enough to fix.
These are just a few of my tips and standard practices for retouching your professional headshots. Of course, if there are any specific retouching issues that you have we can take note of that during your session. I do all of my own headshots retouching here in the studio. Once in a while, I get something that is beyond my expertise, so to maintain top-quality looking photos I outsource to my retoucher and generally have images back from her in a day or two, depending on her work load. If you have any questions or would like to book your headshot session with me in Clarksburg, or my Rockville studio, click below and reach out! Looking forward to getting you in front of my camera.
My Rule Of Thumb. What Gets Retouched?
My general rule of retouching is that I don’t want it to be noticeable. I don’t want to hear “Wow, you have a great retoucher”. So, I stick to some simple guidelines when retouching headshots. If it wasn’t there last week and it won’t be there next week, I’ll take it out. Sometimes we get little acne marks or take a direct hit in the face from that feisty kitten and we can’t fix those beforehand. Those issues I will automatically take out in post.
I do some light skin smoothing, but I keep it looking natural, we don’t need you looking like a porcelain doll. So, those little lines we get under our eyes or to the side of our eyes will get lightened up, but not taken out completely.
The whites of your eyes will be whitened enough to get the red out. Teeth will be whitened a bit as well.
Again, the goal is always to make you look like you! Not a Vogue model over retouched version of you.
If you feel more comfortable having a stylist here at your headshot session, I can arrange to have mine here.
About John Armato
John Armato is a professional headshot photographer based in Clarksburg, MD, and serving headshot clients throughout the Rockville, Bethesda, and Washington D.C. areas. John specializes in professional business and corporate headshots, acting headshots, realtor headshots, physician and healthcare headshots, branding headshots, and more.
No matter if you are looking for on-location or in-studio headshots, reach out to John today!