[alessya]

I'm curious if there is someone on this forum who knows how to high end retouch. This is such a difficult skill to acquire and I'm curious how did you managed to learn such a technique? Did you bought dvd tutorials or did you found some great ones online, like on youtube or vimeo, for example?

[EnglishBob]

That depends on what you mean "High-end" retouch.

If you mean photo restoration, self taught.

If you mean skin smoothing, eye brightening etc like magazine covers typically do, mixture of self taught and magazine articles.

If you mean something else, please explain!

[NT73]

Seems to be that, and a few other bits like altering the lighting etc.
Have you tried a google for it. I found a few sites with tutorials.

[kNox]

I'm slowly starting to get the hang of retouching. I went from knowing nothing a couple of months ago to being able to do some very basic retouching quickly and accurately now. But no high end retouching here.

[jinko]

I would also like to know the difference between high end and "normal" retouching. Anyway, I haven't done neither but if someone has, I'd like to know has it been easy to find such work?

[alessya]

Basically, high end retouching means you donțt smoothen the skin, for example, like you do on a basic retouch, but you use a combination of tools and techniques like healing on a high pass filter to preserve the skin texture. Same thing applies for, hair, nails, clothes and pretty much everything that makes a good image.
Some examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGtCoEpTcWg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP2EbW8OtUU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mOAdOTHzTg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2mE8_ZN4ho

[jinko]

Ok, so you're saying that basically it's about a process that is more creative and complex instead of just using the basic filters like if it was an assembly line job, a case of "bad Photoshopping" to create photos where the skin looks very unnatural and too smooth.

[alessya]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Of course, it's a really complex process that can lead up to 4-5 hours of skin retouching only, depending on the quality of the photograph itself. The point is that you can find a lot of helpful tutorials about this on youtube and such and once you create your own style of processing your images they become easy to recognise by others.