Yup, I’m talking about the people who slave away for hours in front of their computers, pushing and tweaking pixels all day long. Its a funny thing but often their best work is totally unseen by the final viewer and is often unnoticed by the client. Take for instance a simple portrait retouch job, if the digital artist whacks a bloody great big Photoshop plug-in, fix everything in one hit filter over an image, people will often say WOW! How good is that, what a fabulous retouch artist on so on. Show the same person a beautifully retouched super sharp beauty portrait from a cosmetic advert, and they’ll more likely comment on how great the models skin is, or they just fixed that in Photoshop.
The reason I bring this up today is I’ve just watched our digital artist working on a very closeup face shot of a very beautiful young model. The high resolution image fills her monitor with only little pieces of the models face at a time. Perfect as our models skin was by any standards, up this close at high resolution and shot through expensive glass, things are not looking great. I’m simply amazed as the curser seemingly takes a life of its own, flying around the screen at lightning speed. A little piece of dry skin here, a couple of unsightly pores there all magically vanish as she expertly drives her computer to its limits. At one stage I noticed that her 8 core dual processor machine, loaded to the gills with RAM was starting to battle, and she had to wait for it to catch up. No tricks, no filters just plain old retouching skills, leaving the face in the finished job looking as if it had never ever been near any retouching. As I said earlier a great digital artist’s work is mostly unnoticed.
So for the record, I’d just like to say a big thank you, not just to my own digital artist, but all the artists all over the world who help make good photos sing. And occasionally save really bad photos as well. Thanks team!
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