Portrait Retouching – Ultimate Bundle | The Complete Portrait Retouching for the Artistically Challenged Course

In the past, when the arts made the transition from state & religion sponsorship to patron sponsorship, the wealthy commissioned paintings of their likeness in a flattering presentation and the portrait became a staple of the artist’s livelihood. Much later, with the advent of photography, the portrait became accessible to the average person, and a whole industry developed to support it. The mechanical nature of photography, however, posed a problem for the goal of flattering the subject. Makeup and lighting were tools used to present the subject in an idealized way, but often these didn’t go far enough to hide defects that were revealed in glaring detail. The art of retouching developed as a way to beautify the subject. This required great skill, and was most often a separate discipline from the job of photography itself. The skills necessary for the retoucher, turned out to be essentially the same as those required of the painter! Retouching was an art that used brushes and pencils, and later, airbrushes to achieve the desired transformation.

Today, after the few years of development in computer imaging, the skills required for retouching are radically different, and offer astonishing capabilities that go way beyond what even the most skilled artists could achieve with the traditional art tools of the past. Also, most of the artistic craftsmanship need for the task of retouching has been shifted to the computer, and the average person can master the craft in a very short time, without the many hours of practice that skill with tradition art tools required.