Orange’s guide to natural retouching. (roll over Rebecca above to see her before picture)
The topic of retouching can be a tricky one. With advances in digital technology, the widely accepted embrace of digital photography by the professional photography community and the saturation of photo enhancement programs, everyone is “photoshopping” these days. It’s expected. It’s requested. Even the name of the program, Photoshop, named after the most widely used photo enhancement program, has become a recognized verb. But with this ease of altering photographs, a medium that was once revered as the ultimate factor of proof, one can easily take it to the extreme. Let’s break it down.
Google “Bad Retouching” – or better yet, check out what your favorite celebrity looks like unretouched, without make up and notice the stark differences in the images we see every day. With great power comes great responsibility!
So we here at Orange see it appropriate and necessary to hammer out our Rules of Retouching. Our approach to retouching is simple; we want you to look like the best you possible. An important caveat of that is to make sure your image is still a representation of you, and not airbrushed into a cartoon or scary wax figure. Here are a few steps we take to ensure you look your best:
- We like a NATURAL look. We still want to see pores and such. You have skin. We like skin.
- Blemish control is a must. Adult acne is a real thing but you would never know it looking at our photos. But we do limit our cloning. Your Marilyn Monroe-esque beauty mark will be unscathed.
- Last night’s activities will not be apparent in your face or smile! We get rid of sleep deprivation and hangovers by lightening whites of the eyes, teeth brightening, and minor under eye wrinkles/bags reduction.
- Bad hair day? We help. 12 Cats? That’s cool. Obvious stray hairs and lint on clothes will be addressed. But your blue shirt will still be blue, and your curly hair will still be curly.
What better way to show you we are serious by retouching photos of ourselves! It’s time things got real. Get to know the Orange team by checking out our Orange staff headshots below, complete with SHOCKING UNRETOUCHED photos for added effect! (just roll over each image and see if you can see what we did when the un-retouched image shows up)
Bottom line: Anything is possible with Photoshop. And we can do that. We choose not to and stand behind our portraits as representational, approachable, and REAL.
