Retouchup Blog

24
May
May ’21 – Week 4 – Artist Mentorship Program

What we did to improve your service this month - Artist Mentorship Program

Better quality retouching is a BIG win for you! This month we got together with our senior retouching artists – many have been with us for a decade or two – and introduced our Artist Mentorship Program. Our experienced retouching team will personally coach a handful of artists at a time while still continuing to retouch. We’re fast tracking all our artists to give you high level retouching!

 

Memorial Day

With Memorial Day right around the corner, remind your clients that their old heroic family photos can be restored!  Click here to see more military restorations that you can use for marketing!

Memorial day restoration before and after

READ FULL POST
17
May
May ’21 – Week 3 – Restoring Family Legacies

Wood Family damaged - before

Because of the pandemic there is a higher demand for photo restoration than we’ve ever seen! People have spent more time at home cleaning and going through photo albums, leading them to find photos that have become faded or otherwise damaged. Photo professionals have a great opportunity to turn to their client base and let them know their photos can be fixed! RetouchUp offers high-grade restoration services at a low cost.

Give your client base a little nudge and let them know you can restore photos. We’ll provide you with many different examples of photo restoration that you can use in your marketing efforts and are free! Click this link to be taken to the example gallery.

READ FULL POST
10
May
May ’21 – Week 2 – An Interview with Kira Derryberry

Kira Derryberry

We are thrilled that we had the chance to interview Kira Derryberry! Kira, along with the amazing Mary Fisk-Taylor, put out the The Get Your Shoot Together Photography Podcast. Kira also serves as on PPA’s Board of Directors and opened up about what the pandemic has been like for her, and also how she continues to push herself so she doesn’t grow complacent. The full audio and transcript of the interview are below. 

READ FULL POST
03
May
May ’21 – Week 1 – Clipping Success Tips

Our clipping path service can help you create new products. We extract headshots, products for catalogs, as well as individual pictures of athletes and teams for banners and composites. Our clipping service allows you to send us photos of products or people and we will extract them, leaving a transparent background. This allows you to place the extracted subject on any background you choose.

We have heard from many photographers over the years about how they are successful with shooting a good image for clipping. We’d like to share a few tips we believe will help you get a better end result from your clipped images.

 

Lighting

In order to get the best image definition and separation from the background, it is best to use a flash when possible. We have also found it very helpful to place your subjects on a non-lighted white background. The unlit white background will give us adequate separation in most cases. In order to get a good clean clipping, it is best to have good tonal separation between the subject and the background. Dark subjects on a dark background, or very light subjects on a light background, will not give us proper visual reference to make a good clipping. Most any background will work for us as long as we have tonal separation.

 

Aperture

In order to get clean edges for hair and body lines we need a sharp edge line. Use an f/8 aperture as a minimum, especially for head shots where close focus combined with a longer focal length lens will minimize the depth of field. If the hair of a subject is blurry, the clipping will look unnatural. A smaller aperture will also help with groups in defining where to cut the people out.

 

Instructions

Clipping instructions can be tricky when there are objects you want to keep and/or eliminate. Typically baseballs, footballs, etc., are kept in but not always. Consider saying this if you want to keep an object:

Extract subject, KEEP ball (or object)

The example below shows a girl sitting on a chair. The photographer wanted only the girl extracted and wished to eliminate the chair as she was making a composite and the girl would be placed on a platform. In this case, saying:

Extract girl only, REMOVE CHAIR.

will make it very clear to the artists what you desire.

extract basketball player composite - before and after

 

GBB composite poster finished

Saying REMOVE or KEEP helps the artist know what your preference is.

Another thing to be aware of if you photograph groups on bleachers is if you ask us to eliminate the bleachers, you will have gaps in legs where the bleachers covered people. This shows an example of what will occur if we totally remove all bleachers:

People extraction on bleacher before

People extraction on bleacher after

If you photograph on bleachers and would like to know what all we can do, please contact our customer service team.

-Your RetouchUp Team

READ FULL POST