Low contrast B&W Fashion Retouch

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to recreate a low contrast fashion shoot retouch from start to finish.  This is a a beautiful soft look that is perfect for location and studio photos.

All the edits that you are doing are 100% none destructive, which means that you can go back at any time and tweak the different layers to your liking.

Difficulty: Intermediate – Advanced

Completion time: 1 hour – 2 hours

Tools: Adobe PhotoshopCS2 +

Resources

The image you want to edit

or

The stock gallery can be found here if you want some other images to play with 

http://tigg-stock.deviantart.com/

What you’ll be creating:

Note: For Mac users, the correspondent keys for CTRL and ALT are CMD and OPTION.

STEP 1

The colour is pretty good on this image, so we’ll jump straight in and fix up the imperfections.

I’ve circled in blue the what you would fix in this image, which is just the dark circles under the models eyes. I’ve done this on a new layer with the clone tool set to 50%.

STEP 2

Add a channel mixer adjustment layer. I chose the preset black and white with orange filter.

This just means that the settings are as follows:

Red: 50%

Green: 50%

Blue: 0%

STEP 3

Next add a curves adjustment layer.

Make a gentle S curve as a above to bring out the highlights and the shadows a bit.

STEP 4

Add another curves adjustment layer, but this time we’re going to make the image a bit muddy and more like low contrast film.

Bring up the blacks a bit as shown above and drag the midtones down a fraction.

STEP 5

Now create a merged copy – shift-alt-ctrl-E, and right click on the layer and convert it to a smart object. This will give us greater flexibility when we use filters as we will be able to go back and adjust them later.

Go to Filter>Distort>Lens Correction

Leave all the default settings, except set Vignette amount: -100.

Double click on lens correction filter after applying it and set the opacity to 60%.

STEP 6

Then on the same smart object, go to Filter>Other>High Pass

Change the blend mode of this filter to Softlight.

Here’s the finished product!