This type of wedding photo retouching I really enjoy. I have had numerous wedding photo editing assignments where the client wanted the background changed, people added or removed from the wedding photo edit. I really enjoy the cutting out of people, cloning and adding the missing parts to the photo.

This is the first wedding photo edit I completed. To see the before and after move the vertical slider.

She was so happy with the retouch, she asked me to use the same background for another photo of her and the groom. The only photo editing I needed to do for the second photo was cut out the bride and groom and add them to the new background.

Wedding photo retouching services

Here are the two photos of the bride and groom I used to add to the church photo. The photo on the right was a simple cut out, the exposure and colour balance was the same as the new background image, so it was a relatively easy photo retouch.

The second photo was more complicated. The colour balance was different and the exposure of the wedding photo retouch was brighter. I also had to remove the grass from the groom’s shoes and create a shadow for the final retouch.

When the photo editing was completed I asked her if I could use her wedding photos for my portfolio and she replied “Absolutely! Thank you for asking. We are very impressed and excited to have this photo!” She was also kind enough to leave me a 5 star Google review, you can check it out here.

This is only one example of the bespoke wedding photo retouching services that I offer, check out my portfolio for more wedding photo edits.

The post Happy clients make my wedding photo retouching services special appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

I have a team of photo editors based in Bangladesh that specialise in product photography, cutting out and replacing backgrounds. I also employ professional photo editors and photo restoration specialists.

Recently I received a bulk photo editing enquiry from Halo Media Works they described themselves as a company based in Cleveland in the USA. Here is their email:
Hi Team,

Hope all’s well with you. We’re headquartered in the US.We were reviewing your website and the services that you offer are of interest to us.

We are looking for vendors who we could partner with for Retouching services. Could you please share your portfolio of what all services do you offer & their pricing.

We would also like to understand the strength of your organisation as we plan to offer bulk orders, it would be great if you could share the information with us.

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Regards,
HALO MEDIA WORKS

After checking them out online, I replied with my standard outline of my photo editing services that I offer. I mentioned the fact that I often work with large companies and manage bulk orders.

With large orders I have a team of photo editors on standby to process them in a short turnaround. I was a bit surprised that they had asked for my portfolio as I have that clearly linked on my website.

Thanks for writing back.

We’ve checked the ‘Example Work’ tab and the images placed there are greatly edited so well done.

It’s good to see that you’ve served some large corporations and it makes us more confident to collaborate with you. So thanks for sharing this info.

Does your company allow a round of FREE TRIAL image editing for us to gauge your photo retouching services quality and also for you to understand the type of work you will be receiving from us.

Post the FREE TRIAL you can then quote us your best price based on the sample images edited by your company and we can then take it from there.

Photo retouching services

Since this was possibly going to be bulk photo editing orders, I contacted my various retouching partners and asked them if they were happy to do the test images. Of course for them, editing a few sample photos for the sake of a new client was not a problem.

Hi Team,

The instructions to edit these are mentioned within the same folder.

Categories – Baby retouching, Beauty photo editing, Food retouches, Jewellery edits, Product enhancement & Photo restoration.

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

This is when I got a little suspicious as they had sent 12 photos that needed enhancement. Once again I contacted my photo editors and they were happy to go ahead with the test images. When I outsource photos to be enhanced, I always discuss fees with my editors. That way I know how much to quote. The retouched photo edits were then sent to me and I forwarded these to the client.

The before and after example of the beauty retouch sample

I also mentioned’ with all my clients the first job is to get a feel for exactly what they need. Normally I might need to get some amends done. Once I know exactly what my clients want from my photo retouching services, these amends are no longer needed.

I always do a quality check before sending photo edits and I was really pleased with the final photos.

The feedback was quite ludicrous:
Hi Chris, here is our observations for the images edited. Baby, Beauty and Restoration – Your team was able to meet 40% as per our quality expectations. Please share your price for these images and how many such images can you edit per day ?
Jewellery and Food – Overall edit wasn’t satisfactory and did not meet our requirements.
Let us know.

The jewellery photo retouch example.

It was at this point that I realised they were time wasters. My team and I had done a great set of professionally retouched and restored photo edits. All the photo edits that were required for the jewellery retouch were completed. The gold was enhanced, the blemishes were removed and the stone was also edited to bring out the colour.

Like with all of my clients, all expectations of how a final edited photo should look like differ from person to person.

I always say that I am happy to make changes until the photo retouch is exactly what they wanted. They were obviously fishing to see the quality of my work (their competition). And also if they wanted to use my photo retouching and restoration services, they were trying to drive down my prices.

This was confirmed when they sent me a breakdown of what they were prepared to pay:
Below mentioned is our budget.
Baby – $0.75
Beauty – $1.00
Restoration – $2.00

Those prices are laughable, I use specialist retouchers and when I mentioned these, they had a good laugh. One of the downsides of working online is you will always encounter time wasters, but that is by far outweighed by the many great photo retouching and photo restoration projects I get to work on.

I have built a great customer base and they have rewarded me with some 5 star google reviews.

The post Photo retouching services for new clients appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

I believe wedding photos are quite often one of the most memories of a person’s life. As a wedding photo editor, I have sometimes started working with clients that send me their engagement photos for editing. I then retouch their wedding photos, followed by their newborn baby and family photos.

What I enjoy most about digital photo retouching, is communicating with my clients. Listening to their input and feedback, and retouching the images until they are completely happy with their wedding photos. You know you have done a good job when your clients keep sending more photos to edit.

Wedding photo retouching service

I will always strive to keep my photo editing work as personalised as possible. I have many wedding photo editing clients that have told me they have tried other photo retouching companies, but have stopped using them because they cannot communicate directly with the photo editor. When this happens, the client struggles to give detailed instructions on amending the wedding photo retouches.

They have also tried online photo editing apps such as Pixlr X,

or even their mobile applications like Facetune. Unfortunately these apps are really limited in what they can do and are no comparison to a wedding photo retouching service.

I have a team of photo editors working for me. When I have too many photo edits to mange by myself, for example when my wedding photo retouching service receives a bulk order, I will use my team to assist in the photo retouching.

Throughout the process I constantly will check the work and only when I am satisfied will I send the edits to my clients. This ensures that receive photo retouches that meet their specific requirements. If you would like to check out my wedding photo retouching portfolio to see what I can do to improve your wedding photos, click here.

Using this simple business practice I have managed to build up a regular customer base. If you would like to use my wedding photo retouching service, feel free to get in touch. I will always reply to your emails and I am sure I can give you the best possible looking wedding photo.

The post Wedding photo retouching service, my favourite editing work appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

But to my delight, after some digging I realised it was not a con! I had indeed won the photo restoration service of the year award and in September I will be attending the Corporate LiveWire award ceremony.

The prize for best photo retoucher – Southern England

I was informed by Corporate LiveWire that one of the reasons that I had been nominated and had won the Photo Restoration Service of the Year award, was because of my Google Business account. They were particularly impressed with my Google Reviews.

This is what they had to say: “The judges were impressed with your personal nature, consistency of reviews and overall attentiveness. The passion for what you do really comes across and I hope this achievement brings more success during these difficult times. Hopefully things go back to normal soon.”

Covid 19 has impacted all of us, but there are many businesses still striving to give great customer service. This is vital in a highly competitive market and I firmly believe if you have a Google My Business account, offer quality customer service which gets you positive 5 star Google reviews. You will stand out from your competition. The other thing that google reviews do for your business is inspire customer confidence.

Photo Restoration Service of the year

I won the prize because of the feedback I got from my clients. Great Google reviews can really improve consumer confidence in your services. In my photo editing service. I pride my customer care, and I am happy to communicate regularly with you the client and amend photos I have been entrusted to fix until you are 100% happy with the results.

Feel free to get in touch to see what I can do to your photos to really make them stand out!

The post Winning The Photo Restoration Service Of The Year – South England appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

They are a  USA based historical archive of Jewish history, specifically for the Hasidic Jewish community. Obviously once I was contacted by them, I checked them out on  Wikipedia: Hasidism, sometimes spelled Chassidism, and also known as Hasidic Judaism, is a Jewish religious group that arose as a spiritual revival movement in the territory of contemporary Western Ukraine during the 18th century, and spread rapidly throughout Eastern Europe.

A damaged photo I restored to be used as the book cover

Photo restoration services

The photos they sent me to retouch were full of history. There were portrait photos of some of the elders that needed a complete damaged photo restoration. There were also numerous photos of historical events, this included the USA Klu Klux Clan and Neo Nazi movements in the 60’s and 70’s. I always receive professionally scanned photos to edit, most of the time with 16 bits per channel instead of the usual 8 bits per channel.

The Hasidic Archives have used my photo restoration services to to restore their historic photos for more than a decade, it is always a pleasure to to dig into these truly stunning photos and edit them.

If you have any damaged photos, even if you think they are beyond repair, feel free to send them to me, I will happily evaluate them and let you know if it is possible to restore them to their former glory. To read more about a damaged photo restoration I did, from a client that thought was beyond restoration, read here. I was really pleased how the final restoration turned out.

The post Photo restoration services for a historical photo archive appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

As I have mentioned before I am not only a photo editor, I am also a professional photographer. I specialise in event photography, and one of my pre lockdown clients was the National Auditorium in Alicante. I have regularly been invited to photograph and edit their live concerts.

I was pleasantly surprised when I got a phone call from the artistic director last Saturday asking me if I was available to photograph a concert that evening. Fortunately I had nothing planned, and the restrictions had been sufficiently eased for me to go  to Alicante to photograph the concert.

Photography during lockdown

It was a truly strange experience, there were so many restrictions in place when entering the building. For me the temperature scan I had to do was by far the most surreal. The doors to the concert hall were opened at least an hour earlier than normal. This was to allow a slow trickle of people to take their seats. The auditorium can normally accommodate over 100000 people, but the total number that were allowed to enter was a little over 200 people.

The orchestra was spread out completely on the stage. This made me nervous as it was going to be more tricky to photograph, as the normal aesthetics of how I photograph had been broken. The concert lasted only an hour, this added extra pressure on me as I normally have almost two hours to photograph the concert. I did not have the luxury of time, and had to rush quite a bit to get all the photographs needed for my brief.

The concert was fantastic, my movement around the auditorium was limited but I managed to get all my photography done. On the upside of all the covid 19 restrictions, the car park was really empty and I managed to leave without the usual traffic delays.

For me it was a real pleasure being able to do photography during lockdown. And to top this all of, I was even more happy when I was downloading and editing the photos. Instead of using my trusted photo editing tool, Adobe Photoshop, I use Adobe Lightroom to import and retouch the photos. I have various develop presets that I have created for my event photography. Event photography is basically a reportage style of photography. With this plus the fact that I cannot use a camera flash during the concert, makes my photo editing a little more challenging.

My develop presets really speed up my digital photo editing, with one click and a few tweaks I can enhance the darker areas of the photos and add a personal tone to my edits.

This was the first live concert performed in Spain after the covid 19 restrictions were enforced. It was an absolute pleasure to have been able to photograph a live event after the lockdown restrictions, better still I was really happy to be able to put my photo editing services to work as well. If you need a photographer for any aspect of photography, feel free to check out my website. Alternatively if you need me to edit your photos, get in touch with me.

The post Photography during lockdown covid photo editing repercussion appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

I am quite often asked for advice on website issues, such as why is their website so slow to load, and what is the best way to get a product or service visible online. I am not a website developer, but as a professional photo editor, it is my job to prepare the final edited photos for my clients needs.

As I have said before; photos edited for a print brochure are completely different in so many ways to if they have been retouched and prepared for a website or an online marketing campaign.

Improve seo with optimised images

The most important factor when preparing images for websites, is the image size. Many of my clients have inadvertently uploaded huge print sized images for their blog or website. These pages take forever to load. Did you know that you can lose up to 60% of potential customers if a website is slow to load. So the first thing I suggest is that they send all of the photos that they are going to use for their blog or website.

Even if they appear to be final retouched photos, I edit the images by optimising them for the web. This is not an expensive or time consuming process. If you want to learn more about doing this type of photo editing  yourself, you can check out my blog. I have posted articles about optimising images for the web, using an application like photoshop or using an online app.

Once the photos have been resized, the next step to upload them to your website. Something you need to bear in mind, there is a difference between optimising an image for website loading speed and making sure you get the maximum out of seo (Search engine optimisation) for your website.

Many of my photo editing clients do not realise that if you upload an optimised image to a website, without optimising the name of the photo, they have lost a free and easy way to improve seo for the website. Google indexes everything, even photos. So if you upload a bunch of product or services images to your website and they are called “897.jpg”. Even if they have been really professionally retouched, nobody will find them.

Images that appear with a google search

An image needs to be renamed to reflect your product or service. For example if you sell phone accessories, it would be great to rename the photos to “mike’s phone shop.jpg” and variants of that. To prove this point, do a google search for phone accessories, and click on the images link. you will literally see tons of photos, these have been optimised and many people have actually found the website through the optimised photo.

Most websites these days are built on WordPress and this makes it even easier to improve seo, using some really great plugins.

If you do not have the time to download rename and resize all your images, there are some great wordpress plugins to consider. I will go through a few of these plugins that can really help to improve seo:

Optimole

Optimole is a plugin that takes your images from your website and optimises them automatically. It automatically picks the right image size for the visitor’s browser.

Another great feature is it uses lazy loading to display the images, this basically means if you have a lot of photos on one page, the images will only load when you scroll to it. This really speeds up the load time of a website and can really improve seo.

Media File Renamer

This plugin automatically renames your media filenames depending on their titles. When files are renamed, the references to it are also updated (posts, pages, custom types and their metadata). This will really improve your seo.

There are numerous plugins for wordpress websites, including image optimisation and renaming images, only touching on two of literally thousands of plugins that are available for optimising wordpress websites. I know that I have digressed a bit from my photo editing services blog articles, but what I have realised over time, that if you are aware of the reasons you do your work, how it benefits the client, you will get more enquiries.

This knowledge has helped me build up a client base who regularly send me photo editing projects for really specific purposes. I will be posting further articles on how to optimise a website to improve sales.

The post Improve seo and speed up your website appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

Firstly I would like to define what photo retouching is. As soon as somebody hears the words: “retouching a photo”, they automatically think it will end up being a heavily airbrushed photo, nothing like the original. This is not always the case.

Retouching a photo can simply mean adjusting the exposure and colour balance. I shoot my headshot photos using a format called Raw instead of the usual JPEG format.

Most of my headshot photographer clients like Vincenzo Photography, a London based photographer, also send me the Raw files to edit. Using Raw I have a far superior tonal flexibility than JPEG, and this really comes into use when I retouch the photo.

I can really dig into low light details to bring them up and get my highlights in the photo spot on. This gives you the client a far better quality headshot photo!

Most professional digital cameras can also sometimes be prone to having a tiny bit of dust on the sensor. This happens when I am changing lenses.

Even in my sparkling clean studio environment, tiny bits of dust might get trapped on the sensor. That can leave a tiny smudge on the plain parts of the image like the background.

These tiny spots of dust need to be photoshopped out of the photo. This would be classified as basic retouching.

Headshot Photos

Even the most carefully planned shoots can go awry. You could wake up on the morning of your photo shoot to find you have a few acne spots.  Or even worse you could have a slightly bloodshot eye from a bout of spring hay fever.

Obviously you have the option of postponing the headshot photo shoot, but with your agent needing new photos like yesterday, your only option is to go ahead.

It could also be something as simple as a wardrobe malfunction, a button that did not close properly or a bit of dirt on an item of clothing that wasn’t noticed.

Retouching these blemishes do not change you or your appearance. I would say they are more of a tidy up of your photos.

As a photographer I always retouch my own photos, this way I keep control over the quality and authenticity of the images I send to my clients and their agents. I am also aware of how important the privacy of the client is, and the photos are never shared or talked about on social media.

Here is an example of  headshot photos (kindly supplied to me by Vincenzo); before and after they have been retouched. If you look carefully, the glasses pick up a slight reflection from the studio lighting, which I have subtly removed.

This gives the the best possible view of the face without any distractions when looking at the eyes.

Before and after headshot photo retouching

As you can see the only retouching that has been done on the headshot photos is a basic colour adjustment, removal of some unwanted stray hairs and as mentioned the reflection on the glasses removed.

Below is the photo that which has been heavily airbrushed. Obviously this is a completely unrealistic impression of the subject and it would be unacceptable to use as a serious headshot photo.

A heavily airbrushed headshot photo

So when you book your appointment to have your headshot taken by me, or you send me your photos to be edited, you can feel reassured that you will get the best possible quality retouched headshots done!

The post Headshot photos, do they need retouching? appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

You have fired up your desktop, downloaded some photos and want to become a photo editor. Does that mean you have to splash out on high-end photo editing software? This really depends on your budget and how far you want to go with editing your photos. Most desktop operating systems include photo editing tools at no extra cost. Windows 10 has Microsoft Photos included and it offers a decent level of image correction.

For Apple Mac users, Apple Photos is included with the software. It also does a decent basic photo edit. Both apps sync with online storage: iCloud for Apple and OneDrive for Microsoft.

Let’s take a look at some standalone photo editing tools:

Adobe Photoshop – $120 annual subscription

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop started digital image editing 30 years ago.  Adobe’s photo editing tools makes it to be by far the best photo editor on the planet. If you need layered image editing, including typography, 3D modelling, and drawing, Photoshop is for you. Designers, photographers and photo editors find it the most advanced tool available. Photoshop is also compatible with other great applications like Premiere Pro, Illustrator and After Effects so you can easily move files around from one app to the other. Photoshop remains the first choice for professional photo editing software. The main obstacle for some people is the cost of paying the monthly subscription for this app.

Affinity photo  – $49.99 one off purchase

.

Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo is another great photo editing tool. In fact it is my pick for the best budget photo editor for professionals because it offers powerful tools, similar to Photoshop. RAW processing within the interface. It can also read, open and edit Photoshop PSD files and most of the other features that professional photographers want and need — all at a budget price, with no subscription fees.

Gimp – free

Gimp photo editor

GIMP is a free, open-source image editing platform. The app has an array of professional-quality features which can genuinely rival Adobes Photoshop capabilities. Its montage features allow the photo editor to easily fine tune images and create artwork from scratch. GIMP also provides plenty of features for the advanced user including filters, Bezier curves, layer masks, and an animation package. It has an array of compatible downloadable plugins. This photo editing tool is probably the best free image editing application, and the ideal package for photographers who want to get into photo editing without spending a ton of money.

Pixlr – free, $3.99 to $14.99 a month

Pixlr Photo Editor

Pixlr is a web-based photo editing tool for designers, freelance professionals, and amateur photography hobbyists looking for an easy-to-use photo editing solution that is accessible on a wide range of devices, including mobile phones and tablets.

. There are three versions: Free, Advanced and Professional.

The online software provides users with the ability to edit a wide range image types, including .jpeg, .psd, and .gif formats.

This is a web-based application which you can use on your preferred browser, whether it’s Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Explorer.

Picmonkey  – mobile app is free, $70 -120 annual subscription

PicMonkey

PicMonkey is both a photo editing and design tool. It is a fairly powerful yet easy-to-use alternative to complicated  software. PicMonkey also provides a solid amount of graphic design tools.

On the downside PicMonkey has an image size limit. You can choose from three different options, but no option will allow you to upload images larger than 16MP and if you upload a photo that is larger than this the platform will automatically resize it to 4000X4000 pixels.

The downside for me is the pro version costs the same as Adobe Photoshop, for me it would be a no brainer as to which photo editing tool I would rather use.

For further reading, there is a more comprehensive PDF on my Google Drive

As always I hope this post has been of help to you, feel free to contact me if you have any photo editing queries. I will be more than happy to give you a hand!

The post Photo Editing Tools appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.

A list of simple photographic tips to assist when photographing a wedding

I am in the fortunate position to have some really skilled clients like Chris Ferenzi a USA based wedding and event photographer, that regularly sends me quality photos to edit. On the flip side, I also get a lot of photo retouching enquiries from very unhappy brides and grooms. In my opinion weddings are probably one of the most important events in people’s lives and the wedding photos are meant to be a treasure to them. There are many things that can go wrong during a wedding photography photo shoot, below are a few tips that might help you avoid these common mistakes.

Wedding photography tips

1:Set the colour balance manually. I have lost count on the amount of times I have had to retouch wedding photos, to correct a “yellow” or “green” colour cast in all the photos. Weddings usually take place in at least two locations, so it is imperative that the photographer remembers to set the white balance for both locations.

2: If it is possible, go to both venues before the wedding day and do a few test photographs. You can check the photos to evaluate the lighting and see if there are any anomalies that would only appear after you have completed the photo shoot. In this way you can guarantee, no surprises when you open your photos to retouch them.

3: Keep an eye on the film speed (iso).This may sound like a silly tip, but I have had many wedding photo retouching clients, whose only request is to remove the graininess from wedding photos. The surprising thing for me is when I check the photos, they were shot in good lighting environments, but at a film speed (iso) of 1600 which is not needed.

4: Spend time with the bride and groom and get to understand what they are expecting from the final retouched wedding photos. Ask them to show you a selection of wedding photos that they really like, from magazines or online to get an idea of the style of photography that is pleasing to them and ultimately what they are expecting from you.

5: As a resource always take extra photographs of the venue(s). In my experience as a photo retoucher. I have had many requests from my clients to change the background of a photo, that was taken in a not so ideal location be retouched, say to in front of the church or venue as an example. This may not be a fault of the photographer, many clients may change their mind about the ideal setting for the wedding photos after they have been completed.

6: Be very careful when photographing outside to avoid direct light on the subjects. One of my most difficult photo retouching assignments is removing unwanted shadows and also bring back burnt out highlights from peoples faces. Human eyes are far more capable of viewing a wider spectrum of dark and bright areas. Unfortunately even the best and most expensive digital camera cannot correctly capture dark shadows and bright lights in a single image. If you are asked to photograph the wedding party outside, I would suggest looking for a natural umbrella such as a tree or an overhanging building, which will prevent the problems faced with shooting in direct sunlight.

7: If you feel you could do with some photographic inspiration or ideas, browse a wedding magazine or check out a talented wedding photographer’s Instagram feed to get some ideas. I sometimes browse Unsplash which has stacks of really great photos that are beautifully retouched!

8: For me the most important wedding photography tips that I have to share is always double check your equipment before the wedding day. Recently I had a batch of wedding photos to edit that were all out of focus. The camera had failed and the autofocus was not working.

These are only but a few of the common problems I encounter when retouching wedding photographs, I hope these wedding photography tips have been of some use to you. Feel free to contact me if you need any advice with when shooting a wedding.

The post Wedding photography tips how to take great wedding pictures appeared first on In Focus photo retouching and restoration.