A little bit of magic helps

Retouching is a challenge, especially for those in the business of wedding photography, and more so for those in the fashion photography business.
Now, I'm not trying to imply anything here. It's just that I find some people choose the easy way over the "painstaking" way of retouching someone's face. I see a lot of this happening in the wedding photography industry.
The easy way I'm referring to is by using a layer mask that blurs the skin of the person photographed just enough so that his or her skin looks spotless. Some use the "clarity" slider to make the lines and bumps on the skin appear less visible.
Some even go the extra mile, moving the slider a little too much that everything in the picture appears to be glowing.
While these methods can be used to make picture more fancy, they often destroy the skin texture and all...
Take a look at this here photo. It was taken by Frankie on the morning of the lady's wedding day just before she headed home for a traditional tea ceremony, which is an important aspect in a Chinese wedding.
She was getting her make-up applied (in this case, lipstick) by a make-up artist in her hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, and Frankie was busy snapping away at her, to record the goings-on prior to the wedding.
Notice how in the before photo, the bride's face is covered in pimples and blemishes.
I did the retouching on this photo, using non-destructive retouching techniques, which mostly involved burning and dodging as well as cloning. Colour correction was done earlier in Lightroom 2 while retouching was done in nothing more than the simple, yet powerful, Adobe Photoshop CS3!
What's important for this photo, for me, was that I wanted the bride's face to be rather smoother than in the original photo, but not too smooth that she'd end up looking like she'd gone for a plastic surgery. :P
Using different brush sizes, hardness and opacity, I carefully "fixed" the areas that needed "fixing"... mostly the apparent bumps and blemishes that stare dead straight at me. I just wanted to get rid of those.
After doing so, I ended up with a smoother skin, but without destroying the texture and pixels on the bride's face.
I left some bumps on her face, but they're so much less apparent. I mean, c'mon, no one on earth has skin as smooth as porcelain! That's just a load of cr*p! There's gotta be some realism in the photo as well.
As you probably notice, I didn't do that much to this photo... just some retouching on the skin. I left the hair, lips and whatever else just as they originally were. Besides, this is, after all, the bride having her make-up done. You can't expect her to be 100% perfecto if she's still not in full make-up.

p/s: Took me over two hours to complete this one piece of photo! If I did some more adjustments to the other elements in this photo, the whole process would've taken three to four hours. So there, I've said it!
Oh, and stay tuned... we're gonna be posing some photos from this particular wedding soon. - Mark

EDITORIAL: Challenge of shooting an object behind a glass

This afternoon, I got an assignment from a local magazine Borneo Talk to do an advertorial spread for their Food section.
The restaurant was White Rajah Restaurant, a rather snazzy joint located within the Regency Rajah Court Kuching vicinity.
The task was to photograph some of the food for a write-up on the restaurant's breakfast and lunch buffet spread, which included both local and international cuisines.
While it wasn't all that difficult to photograph the food, the real test was when I needed to photograph the chefs at work.
The guy you see here is the chef in charge of the restaurant's Chinese Kitchen.
I was short of time, so I tried taking his photo through the glass that separated us. The result was awful, of course... Too many reflections on the glass.
So I decided to use multiple flash... Well now, that's me exaggerating a little there.
Actually, I just used two flash... a simple setting to achieve a simple effect as seen in the photo you see here.
I didn't want to light up the whole scene... I just wanted enough light to show the chef at work... the rest of the background wasn't that much of an importance to me... not in this setting.
I used an SB900 with a Gary Fong light sphere attached to it, and asked another chef to hold it steady for me on one side, behind the glass screen.
On my side, I just used my camera's pop up flash and covered it with a Lumiquest Mini Softbox.
Voila!!! The result of the shoot is as seen here in the photo on this page.
Oh, and I used a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 D AF lens for this one. - Mark

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