Turn Key Creative Director and retouching specialist Richard Colvill has worked with many world-class photographers including Guy Farrow and this partnership has resulted in various incredible and award-winning projects over the years. In his guest blog post for BlipFoto Richard shares his advice on creative retouching and offers an insight to some recent creative projects produced in collaboration with Guy…
Retouching has completely changed the art of photography and although it still remains a controversial discipline, it is undoubtedly an art form which is constantly evolving and producing ever more impressive results.
Although retouching is an incredibly skilled and time consuming job, achieving the desired end result is only possible if you start with high quality elements. Retouching covers a wide range of techniques and image alterations, from a simple post production clean-up to the creation of an image in CGI that would be impossible to obtain in real life.
In between these two extremes, lies the Natural or Invisible retouch- resulting in a flawless finished piece and Creative Retouch which is my favourite and will be the focus of this post.
Involving the seamless composition of different elements, Creative Retouch usually begins with a concept and subsequent careful consideration of the intricacies faced in the shoot.
Every month I am challenged with creating an advert for Porsche Strasse and this is one of the projects where I have the most creative licence. We have conceived a concept entitled the ‘7 Sins of Strasse’, the first of which was ‘Gluttony’ in which I wanted to portray a car made of cake. The obvious route could have been to commission a bakery to make the cake, but this wouldn’t have been precise enough, so instead we had to use some creative thinking! Guy and I primed a scale model of a Porsche, filled in all the nooks and crannies with icing, added a base and then painted the whole thing in a neutral colour before shooting it.
Creative Retouch was used to combine this with an image we had taken of a cake, resulting in the rather tasty-looking finished product you can see below.
‘Pampered’ is another concept devised by one of our Turn Key designers, Darren Jacques, for an earlier Strasse campaign. This challenging project involved the composition of over ten different images, which was certainly not a quick job! The car was shot first in an industrial setting, and the background was then fully rendered to create the clinical image you can see below. Individual model shots were all photographed separately before being bonded to the car; along with appropriate shadowing and reflections.
Another great example of Creative Retouch on a very different project this time is a series of images created for professional triathlete, Dion Harrison. We wanted to communicate Dion’s incredible strength and fitness through the shots; making it appear as if he was breaking through glass. The images of Dion were all taken in studio and each individual shard of glass was shot separately and compiled. This was undoubtedly a time consuming process but a real labour of love with a stunning end result. In fact the image was so successful it has recently received a prestigious AOP Sun Award and is currently touring the UK as part of the awards exhibition.
Fast on the heels (or trainers!) of completing the Dion shoot, Sony approached us to create a similar concept which would showcase their waterproof headphones. We came up with the idea of capturing an athlete in the rain, but as natural rain is far from an ideal photography environment we had to shoot the athlete in studio. The ‘wet look’ was achieved using a glycerine spray, and we created ‘rain’ by photographing droplets of water on a glass screen, before combining the two images to create the atmospheric shot you can see below.
Although creative retouch is a highly skilled practice, it will only achieve the desired results if the initial images are good quality and well composed. Creativity allows the initial concept or big idea to be devised, skilled photography allows the images to be realised and retouching is (in some cases) quite literally the icing on the cake!
