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Daniel Meadows Design -Professional Photo Retouching and Digital Art

May 5, 2010 by

* Note – this site has moved to www.dmd-digital-retouching.com

Here are the links to my new retouching blog, beauty retouching portfolio and my new fashion and editorial retouching portfolio.

Almost done with the site, thanks to everyone for your patience and suggestions. I’ve done an ample amount of moaning about the trials of web design on my twitter, but we’re almost there, all that’s left to add is my photo retouching portfolio work and to tidy up a bit of lorem ipsum placeholder text here and there.

It’s been my pleasure this week to retouch a beautiful set of images by the frankly astounding beauty and fashion photographer Dallas J Logan. You can find one of the set, America’s Next Top Model contestant Claire Unabia on my front page and the first photograph to grace my retouching portfolio.

I’d highly recommend taking a look at Dallas’ portfolio, which you can find at www.dallasjlogan.com.

Danny

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‘Life’ by Rebecca Litchfield

May 4, 2010 by

I have just finished the story set by the photographer mentioned recently on my twitter, Rebecca Litchfield, and it looks amazing (oweing in full to Ms. Litchfield’s talents I must admit).

The Life set is part of a five piece fashion story entitled Edenias, inspired by views on Life, Death, Hell, Purgatory and Heaven as held by the conventional Abrahamic religions. Rebecca draws on powerful Catholic imagery and the representation of Mary as Mother of God and the branches of the tree of life, with red makeup detail to represent life in her lips and cheeks. That the subject holds a token symbolic of the death of God made flesh is notable in its subtlety and relevance to the Death story and the transience and fragility of living things. Rebecca references the works of Emily Dickinson and Salvador Dali as starting points in planning the Life images.

“My biggest aim… is to create more energy and emotion in my images, to create a true journey for the viewer”


Rebecca has been a photographer for four years, and is already established as one of the most impressive emerging talents from the UK in recent years, with an impressive body of published work. She was voted ‘Professional Photographer of the Year‘ in 2009 and recently founded her own company, working as a fashion photographer in London.

I highly recommend viewing Rebecca’s website at http://www.rebeccalitchfield.com.

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Top 5 Photoshop Retouching Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

March 25, 2010 by

Welcome to my top five list of Photoshop Retouching Mistakes. If you’re a beginner-intermediate level retoucher, please take five minutes to read through an article that will hopefully, in at least some small way,  improve your working thought process for life.

(excuse the weird formatting of the images, a theme change threw it all out, I’ll solve it soon)

I’m not going to go into massive depth with step by step tutorials, as I don’t believe in them. My apologies for quickly glossing over techniques I don’t have the space to go into in depth here, if as a beginner you’ve never used luminosity masking for example, consult Adobe’s help file, then use your imagination to play with your new selections, using various fills and adjustment layers. If any technique is new to you, go straight to that help file and then experiment before looking at any top ten Google tutorials. The single worst way to learn how to retouch is by looking through the millions of tutorials search engines throw up, because they’re simply saturated with ‘quick-fix’ ten step promises of perfection in under ten minutes. The truth is, perfection isn’t that simple, and neither is good retouching. So if you decided to add something to your Photoshop skill set today, make it what you take from this article. [Read more…]

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20 Years of Photoshop Welcome Screens

January 22, 2010 by

While we wait for CS5 (rumoured to be scheduled for the second quarter of 2010), here’s a look back over 20 years of Adobe Photoshop welcome screens. Every release of Adobe’s industry standard photo editing software prior to 6.0 is alien to me, but perhaps those horrendous 90’s splash screens will bring back memories for some of you. [Read more…]

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Photoshop – Why so serious?

January 21, 2010 by

Having spent eight years using Photoshop for good and mischief, in recent years I’ve stepped firmly away from compositing The Ultimate Warrior piledriving Buzz at the moon landing and into the world of serious photo editing and digital art. It’s a trend I’ve seen developing a lot recently, a considerable number of today’s digital artists and retouchers I’ve spoken to started out as I did. Some of the most beautiful work from the most modern of art forms has its roots in the early 2000’s, Photoshop 6, and putting Chuck Norris in space, just because suddenly, we could.

Photoshop turns a digital image into Lego bricks and the new user into a child. By the time that child grows up, he/she has an intimate knowledge of a set of tools that surpass the old dark room tricks a thousand times over. It’s easy to look down on the teenager holed up in his/her bedroom custom building glitter text for their myspace, or selectively colouring an object from a snapshot, but to do so, even from those generic online tutorials, instills an understanding of animation, paths, masks and curves. [Read more…]

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Retouching In Photoshop 1 – The Basics Page 2

January 2, 2010 by

Once you’ve completed Retouching in Photoshop Page 1, you may have started to notice the next problem to tackle. We’ve softened and removed the main blemishes, but the skin tone is still blotchy and uneven. In this next step we’ll solve this problem using the dodge and burn tools.

Look at our image below (you will need flash player installed to view it) and roll your mouse cursor over the image. Highlighted in green are areas that are a little too dark, and highlighted in red are areas that are too light. Roll your cursor over a few times, allowing your eyes time to adjust to each image. Remember that too dark or light is hugely subjective, and the example given is one artist’s very rough 60-second appraisal of the skin tone variations at a macro level. It’s just a guide, but it should be enough to train your eye towards these variations. There are others I’ve missed out, and no doubt a few errors, so don’t follow it exact. It’s ultimately up to you how you interpret your image. [Read more…]

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Retouching In Photoshop 1 – The Basics

January 2, 2010 by

Welcome to Part 1 in a series of retouching tutorials aimed at the beginner. I’ve always loved the art of retouching and have been more than happy to tutor and teach people new to the software and the art. Having been asked to produce these Photoshop retouching tutorials it is with great pleasure I bring you this first introduction to retouching for beginners.

Before reading this first Photoshop retouching tutorial I would suggest reading my article on Retouching Mistakes and How To Avoid Them. Having a solid idea of why you’re editing something will make the difference between being an artist or a computer operator in your new hobby or profession as a retoucher. The retouching techniques you will learn through this series of articles will give you the tools you need, and advice on how those tools should be applied on a case by case basis, rather than treating them as catch-all techniques.

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