London Photographer : Photoshop Creatives

February 19, 2014

I may be a photographer but I'm also a self taught Photoshop user. It's a must for a photographer to take every picture into Photoshop or the sister product Lightroom, rate it, do some simple adjustment and produce the final picture. After all the average 1hr portrait session will result in around 100 images that need to be reduced to a suitable amount to retouch and deliver, maybe upto 20. An event shoot could have upto 1500 pictures taken which will end up with around 500 delivered. To be successful the photographer has to 1. Have a critical mind 2. Ensure the pictures that he chooses meet the requirements of the client ( and are not necessarily the ones I might like the most 3. Only deliver the very best work.

Any photographer that tells you the pictures you get are direct from the camera is both not telling you the truth, and if they are then the picture you get is not the best it can be. In the old days of film you couldn't just take the negative and beam it on to a wall it needed to be developed and there were many tricks available in the pld darkroom that would put Photoshop to shame. In short each and every picture a customer sees needs to be processed in some small way.

Every portrait photographer needs to know how to retouch a photo. Clean skin, brighten eyes, take out the wrinkles. In some cases change a head in a group shot.

But what when you want something else, art from the photo. That's where something I call Creatives come to life. They can be a simple matter of laying out a series of pictures on a single frame, a subtle change colour wash or similar. The fun really really starts when you get to really start to think of your pictures as art .... what can you do then. Here's a few examples ... but the full gallery is here. I don't get as much time to do Creatives as I'd like but they are still a key part of the service.

Keywords: London, Photographer, Photography, Photoshop, Portraits