Restoration and Digital Manipulation

Rates are $100 per hour for all restoration and digital work, except senior portraits which include retouching.

Below is a typical restoration, and represents roughly
15-20 minutes. I can work within your budget and provide free estimates with previews.
Don't like the preview? Don't pay.

 

Portrait Retouching and Digital Airbrushing

Nobody's perfect. Even the youngest, most beautiful models in the world need a little touching up.

It's the details after a shoot that make a portrait different from a snapshot, and the camera sees things
a lot differently than the human eye. I make every portrait as faithful as I can to what I see, not what the
camera sees. Sometimes that means the removal of blemishes, sometimes it means adjusting an angle,
but it always means you get the real you.

When looking at a portrait, people should see you, not your human imperfections. Click the images
below for a "before and after" example. The portrait on the left is a high-resolution version of the image
you see. The sample on the right is animated to show both before and after airbrushing.

  

 

Black and white is not the absence of color

The differences are subtle, to be sure, but nevertheless important.

To convert a color image to black and white, it's necessary to apply filters on the different color channels, just like
traditional film photographers, who use filters on their lenses when shooting with black and white film.
Superman's cape was actually brown in the old TV show, because it looked more natural in black and white.

Many of today's service providers lack the traditional film background to note these subtleties, and the result is
a harsh image, with overexposed whites and lost detail. This is where experience matters.

The photo on the left has had proper black and white conversion. Note the background is visible, the colors of the dress are distinct, and the skin tones are natural. The image on the right simply had the color removed. The background is completely missing, the shirt is nearly the same color as the dress, and the skin tones are too dark, with too much contrast.

Note that this is the exact same image--the difference is in post-processing, not in lighting or exposure. Some of the
conversion settings were "pushed" a bit to make the differences more striking for this example. Personally, I'd prefer a slightly darker background, and a bit more contrast in the model's face.