Category — Prepress

I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post!  How could I have let so much time pass by?  We’ve been getting busy around the studio again, and while Bill has been shooting nearly every day of every work week, I’ve been busy with some back-to-back retouching jobs.  After a small break over the winter, we began working again with a client that Bill has been shooting for, for nearly 20 years.  They’re among the leading manufacturers of dance and gymnastics costumes in America.  Starting in February Bill shoots for them roughly 2-3 weeks per month up to December, though there are several breaks scattered throughout this time.  Each photo shoot is a large job with multiple sets and many people involved to keep it running smoothly.  They output roughly 5 main catalogs, some twice a year, and various other supplements and publications.  The first to be printed this year is their line of leotards for gymnasts.  They have two different catalogs for this; one is a higher-end series for performance and the other is a little more light and fun.The following images first show the raw image developed without any adjustments.  The following paired images afterwards show the raw developed WITH adjustments followed by the final retouched photo.  You’ll notice that through tweaking the RAW file, more contrast and better flesh tone were achieved, giving me an advantage before even developing the file.

- Before/After

- Before/After

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In order to give the skin tones pop while editing RAWs, I use the Color Editor feature in Capture One PRO to make a selection of the skin tone, then boost the saturation and/or lightness depending upon the lighting conditions.  Afterwards, I just save the ICC profile and am able to use it again for other images.  I have created several of these, all dependent upon the lighting of the image, the skin tone of the model, and various other criteria.  This method helps greatly helps minimize steps that would later be taken in retouching the file.

Hey everyone, sorry for the long break in updating! With being swamped with the holidays and a retouching job it’s been hard getting time to work on our blog. Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and New Year’s celebration!

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a retouching job shot by Bill for one of our clients. They’re a great store which carries high-fashion clothing, jewelry, shoes, and other products; not to mention they have a wonderful restaurant with delectable food. These are before/after pictures of some of the work I did to them:

The first step I took was to clean the model’s faces by removing blemishes and dark circles under their eyes (without making the eyes look like plastic or fake). My favorite tool for this in Photoshop is the patch tool, it’s so quick and if you use it in the appropriate areas it will keep texture to areas you fix and also gradate much nicer than using the clone tool. For circles under the eyes, however, I like using the clone tool at a low opacity to help soften harsh lines.

The next step I’ll take is to remove wrinkles or straighten clothing as requested by the client on the proofs we give them. Sometimes this also includes thinning parts of the clothing that may appear too big on the model. This tends to be more difficult to do when there are patterns involved or texture is a big part of the fabric. I rely heavily on the patch tool, clone tool, and liquify filter. Often times I have to almost make up part of the fabric in order to make it blend well, so I recommend a steady hand and good coordination with your eyes. Sometimes the wrinkles would merely need to be minimized instead of removed. In theses cases I would make a soft light layer filled with 50% gray and paint in white over shadow areas of a crease then use black over the highlight area to help reduce it’s appearance. If there’s a moire pattern in the fabric make a selection of the area it appears and place it on a separate layer. With that layer selected check each individual channel (red, green, & blue) and where it is shows up apply first a gaussian blur and then add a little noise.

Generally the final step I take is to correct the skin tone/color and also the color of the clothing if needed. While there was no problem with the outfits in these shots, I did do work on skin tones to help unify them when they’re on a spread and also give them more kick of contrast if needed. The hue/saturation softlight layer trick I mentioned in THIS POST is one method used, and sometimes I’ll also do a curves adjustment. While these are the general steps I took in retouching for this job, it certainly varies on what you’re working on.

In order to print a contract proof of an image that will later be used to match to the final printed piece by a press, it is vital that your printer can output color accurately based on the industry standard. SWOP, or Specifications for Web Offset Publications, Inc., “is an industry organization that has developed a certification process for ensuring the consistency and quality of printed materials.” Epson offers a line of printers that meet this standard and they even include SWOP certified RIP software.

At the studio we use the Epson Stylus Pro 3800 professional printer along with the software ColorBurst RIP, and it is incredible! Shortly after we first got this printer we had a color specialist from a local printing press offer to run tests for us and to check it’s linearization. Right out of the box the printer was as near perfect as can be, everything was dead-on accurate and even the specialist was a little taken aback. Epson’s high-density pigment K3 inks have an ultra-wide color gamut and a higher D-Max (a measure of the density of the darkest tone a printer can produce).

In conjunction with the printer is the use of ColorBurst RIP. “RIP stands for Raster Image Processor and is software that takes your image and text and tells your printer where and how to place each drop of ink on the paper. It’s designed to deliver every bit of performance and quality your printer can provide.” With this software you are given more control over the output of color. Besides the basics of choosing what paper to print on with how much dpi, you are able to set a simulation CMYK profile for each photo you print. It is thanks to this feature that the proofs will be as accurate as possible. The profile standard we use is Gracol 7. G7 is a fairly new profile that was invented by Don Hutcheson. His aim was to help standardize CMYK printing. It is a superior profile that offers a rich gamut of colors. For more information on G7 printing, please visit HERE for a wonderful description and also Gracol.org.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned Bill shooting for a cabinetry company, well I want to discuss in depth the process of prepress photo retouching and use that job as an example. Let me begin by showing before and after photos. None of these images have their final crop applied to them, we like to work on the entire image to give our clients leeway in their final decisions.

While not all jobs are approached the same, there are general steps taken between shooting and delivering final hires images to clients. For this client, their need of the images ranged from running them in national magazine ads, to using them for their personal public relations. After the photo shoot, Bill supplied them with lores jpegs of everything shot, of which they make their selections from. Once notified of their selections, I grabbed the RAW images and developed them to Tiffs. It’s important to use the raw data, as it contains all the information of that image and will allow you more room to make changes in exposure and color. It is also important to take your time when developing your files, creating a good starting point with balanced color and contrast will help minimize the time to adjust those things later.

Before I continue, I want to explain how we go about generating jpegs and tiffs. At the studio we use Hasselblad medium format cameras and also large format view cameras, with PhaseOne’s H20 digital backs. In conjunction with the digital backs, we use Capture One Pro software. This software is truly amazing for capturing images (whether with the H20 or a digital SLR camera), organizing them, and processing them. It gives you unlimited choices in editing your raw images. When you’re ready to develop them, you have the choice to output hires tiffs, or you can choose their “Quickproof” choice for jpegs at whatever size and resolution you want and it’ll process them blazingly fast. If you’d like to learn more about either their digital backs or the Capture One software, visit Phase One

For some clients we would at this point take the tiffs we developed and make a 13″x19″ proof for them to note what changes needed to be made. However, for this company they gave us samples of the woods used beforehand and due to our long relationship working with them, we knew what kind of changes and retouching they would be needing. I don’t want to get too offtrack now, but tomorrow I want to better explain how we proof images and discuss CMYK color spaces.

Bill is a firm believer in doing retouching work in RGB while “soft-proofing” in Photoshop, as opposed to converting a file right away to CMYK and working on it from there. For those who are unsure of the difference, RGB (red, green, blue) is a color space used by computers and many other digital devices. It has a wide range or “gamut” and can show very bright, intense colors. CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, k for black) is used by printers and printing presses. It does not have as wide a gamut and many times the bright colors seen in RGB will be clipped and appear duller when printed. By soft proofing, you’re able to see how an image will appear when printed and adjust the color accordingly and by staying in RGB mode you have a greater flexibility in adjusting the image. For more information, I’ve found a wonderful pdf HERE

Quick note, I highly recommend using layer files to make your corrections. It does increase file size which can be a burden (some files I worked on reached over 800 MB in size), but it’s easier to make changes this way and tweak your image at a later time. The first thing I always do is a general glance over the file, removing any dust spots and possibly photo equipment, and also fixing things like the verticals for architectural shots. Afterwards is when I begin color and contrast corrections. This is why it becomes vital to have your screen calibrated right so you know what you see is what you’re going to get at the printing press or even on another computer.

Once I reached the point I felt comfortable with the changes I had made, I made a proof to check how the images looked on paper and to compare the colors of the images (since they’re photos of the same items, you want color to be consistent and accurate). I then tweaked any images that were a bit off. When finished, I sent flattened hires Tiff files to the client with a proof showing the final images.