Photoshop is an amazing tool, but retouching is seldom simple. It requires patience and problem-solving ingenuity; no two photographs are the same. It's not enough to know how to drive the tools, you have to have a mental map of where you're going.
This is a gallery of before-and-after images, animating through stages. The shots are captioned with details, like whether I was the photographer, and who the shot was for.
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This is a shot I did a couple of years ago for a Stanley Korshak jewelry catalog. I was really lucky the model had great skin, but there was still some work to be done to create a glowing alabaster perfection. These rings were HUGE and it was a challenge to keep them all from spinning around to face straight down.
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The chrome android was shot for Salem Cigarettes in 1997 (green background, of course). I was hired by an ad agency called West-Wayne based in Atlanta. This shot was part of a campaign that included about a half-dozen other characters; we did a Gargoyle and a Vampire too. I shot in LA in my friend Aaron Rapoport's studio in Hollywood, so we could be close to a great model building studio that was recommended to me by an old friend who works at Lucasfilm in their model department. The budget for the whole production was substantial. My production concept was to build a life-cast maquette which was molded directly on the model who we shot for the eyes and lips. My model builders sanded and polished the maquette and then we sent it out to be chromed. Photoshop was barely at version 4.0 when I did the post production (we didn't have layers in Photoshop until version 3).
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This is a shot from the Stanley Korshak Jewelry Catalog that I shot in 2009. The jewelry is the primary focus, but the wardrobe has to be just right too; they sell designer clothes as well as jewelry.
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I shot this campaign a few years ago for an ad agency called Signal. The product was a tanning accelerator called Smoke. We did three different concepts for use as 20" x 30" point of sale posters and double-page ads. The hard part turned out to be creating the smoke wisps, particularly the ones that had to wrap around the corner posts of the burning bed.
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Shot by the great Jeff Stephens for Sally Beauty Supply point of sale and brochures and art directed by their excellent in-house art department. I was hired just for the digital finish work by Melanie Spiegel who was the production co-ordinator. This series of shots were all about great hair. It was a real challenge for me to bring up the shine but also smooth and fill in holes in the hair which is never perfect when blowing.
