Retouching in Skincare – what’s important?
We talked about Retouching being a controversial topic, and now we’re taking it a step further going in depth on Retouching in Skincare (Photography). There’s a behind the scenes video at the end of this post by the way :)
The Retouching process in Skincare starts with chosing the right model / the right skin. You want to keep Skincare images as natural as possible. Chosing a model with pretty bad skin means a lot of retouching which isn’t what we want. I would suggest chosing a model with fairly good skin.
When you’re shooting Skincare I recommend not using any Make-up (Foundation, Concealer etc.) at all. The images should look as real as possible, and having a “makeup skintexture” undernear skincare isn’t natural at all - we apply skincare on our naked skin in “real life” so the skin should look naked in the images aswell.
Then when you’re actually retouching you should keep a few things in mind.
#1 keep the texture as natural as possible. By that I mean don’t make the skin look super smooth and remove all the pores. We want to have visible pores to keep the images natural. When shooting Skincare, the images should be selling the product. In order for us to buy something we need to relate to the image/product, the promised effects need to be something we can realisticly achieve by using the product. Having no pores isn’t something we can achieve, but having an even skintone is something that’s possible.
#2 know the product. In order to make the image sell the product you need to know what the product does. If it’s a moisturizer that’s supposed to make skin very glowy, the skin in the photos needs to look glowy and healthy – not matte. If you’re photographing a powder the skin should not look glowy because that’s not what the powder does.
#3 don’t go overboard with Dodge and Burn. With Skincare you want to focus on micro Dodge and Burn the most – make the skin look even. Heavily contouring or highlighting with Dodge and Burn looks like there’s Make-up on the skin aka not natural and that’s not what we’re going for here.
#4 the texture + color of the product. As we talked about before, these images should be selling the product. Therefore it’s important that you keep the natural color and texture of the product aswell as the skin texture. I try to not edit/retouch the product itself at all to make sure it looks exactly how it does in real life.
