Hair Retouching with Michael Woloszynowicz

In every beauty, portrait and fashion image, the face usually takes up the majority of our retouching time and although the hair is often secondary, it can never be ignored. While we use some of the same tools for retouching hair as we do for skin, the techniques and challenges vary quite greatly.

Having an experienced hairstylist on set will help you create a finished look, but once the model begins to move and pose for the camera, it is next to impossible to keep the hair as perfect as we would like. Since getting a strong pose, facial expression and perfect makeup is often more important than keeping strands in check, the job of making the hair look good often falls on the retoucher.

Despite the retouching challenges, a skilled hair retouch makes a tremendous difference in the final image, helping achieve a clean editorial or commercial result. With this video course, our goal is to teach you how to fix common hair issues in beauty, portrait and fashion photography using simple retouching tools and techniques, while offering a variety of methods to take the struggle out of the process.photo

Although most retouching artists and photographers love to retouch skin and faces, retouching hair is often seen as a necessity rather than an enjoyable activity. Yet, despite the retouching challenges, a skilled hair retouch makes a tremendous difference in obtaining a clean editorial or commercial look in the final image.

With this video course, our goal is to teach you how to fix common hair issues in beauty, portrait and fashion photography using simple retouching tools and techniques and offer a variety of methods to take the struggle out of the process. In some lessons, we will show you alternative methods for battling common hair issues in post-production so you can choose whichever works best depending on the image at hand.

Please keep in mind, this is not a beginner course; it requires some basic knowledge of Photoshop tools, layers, adjustment layers, blending modes and masks. However, we do provide additional setting details for the tools used in video lessons as well as the layered PSD files, so you can easily apply the same concepts to your own work.

This isn’t a course to teach you how to completely transform the look of the hair in an image, or make it look like the absolutely flawless, polished hair in a hair product advertisement – the market for that type of photography and retouching is incredibly narrow and those skills, intensity and endless hours are rarely needed outside of that market. Which means the amount of time you would need to devote to mastering that type of tedious hair retouching would likely have minimal return on that investment.

On the contrary, this course is designed to help you learn to tackle the most common challenges with hair in your personal and commercial work in the beauty, portrait and fashion genres of photography – the largest photography and retouching market.

PRACTICE IMAGES

Along with the video course, you will download 8 images in the form of layered PSD files. These images were photographed in Los Angeles by Michael Woloszynowicz & Julia Kuzmenko exclusively for the Retouching Academy courses and students.

Follow the video lessons while analyzing the layers in these PSD files, and practice retouching hair in the areas we outline for you in the Assignments part of the Digital Guide PDF. We encourage you to go further and retouch these images completely, then share the results in the Retouching Academy Community Group on Facebook for peer and pro feedback, or on your social media tagging Julia and Michael and @retouchingacademy.

Here’s a quick BTS video from the shoot where the Practice Images were captured: