Retouching – Before & After

The “Before” photo still required coordinating the lighting inside and out

When shooting outside the weather is not always cooperative. Sometimes a schedule may require photos before the site is perfectly finished. Here are some examples of projects where knowing how to shoot the subject to be “perfected” later in the computer is especially useful.

In this example the weather was ideal 2 days before the “Grand Opening”, but the lawn was not yet in. Rather then risk shooting in the rain we made sure that nothing overlapped out of the lawn areas and added the lawn later in the computer using  “lawn stock” we created the same day in the same lighting.

This location needed to be shot on short deadline for an award for a subcontractor. Not only was the sky gray, but fencing and a crane came into the shot. The site required a super wide angle lens shooting closer to the building. We corrected the perspective, added a new sky, reflected that sky in reverse in the glass wall, removed the fencing and crane and finally green the grass.

For this example we shot the theater at sunset from a ladder using long exposures to blur out any people walking through the shot. Afterwards we corrected the perspective, cleaned up the snow bleached concrete and the cracked asphalt. We also added neon to the top of the spire, cleaned up and evened out the sky, removed a window sign (right side) and opened up the shadow areas.

This example is in Kokomo, Indiana. When we got there we discovered that the lawn had not yet been installed. We also had a less than ideal sky. Finally we felt that the red truck was a distracting color so we changed that too.

This was contracted by photographer, Dan Poyourow of Potomac, MD. He wanted us to change the scene to better reflect the fall time of year. After correcting the perspective we changed the leaves on the ground from brown to more red/orange. Then we did the same to much of the trees in the background. We also removed the branch overlapping the building, darkened the driveway and enhanced the color and contrast of the building resulting in a much more dramatic version of the shot. The assignment included 6 image views all completed in 3 hours billing total.