Photo editing in fashion photography is like salt for a dish: you only need a pinch of it and it makes all the difference. But too much of it and the dish goes bad.
While retouching images in the glamour industry is quite a common practice, it must be done in an ethical manner. Meaning, retouching should highlight the visual appeal of the images but at the same time, it shouldn’t diverge far from reality while doing so.
Whether you’re a fashion company, designer, photographer, stylist, or model — photo retouching offers you an amazing opportunity to optimize your photos to visually enticing your prospects to buy more.
What does photography retouching actually mean?
In simple words, the process of retouching is nothing but the removal of undesired elements in a photo. Basic retouching methods in the fashion industry include color correction, skin retouching, blemish removal, background removal and detail enhancement . One of the most popular software programs used to edit images is Adobe Photoshop.
Key benefits of photo editing in fashion photography.
Visual Appeal
As you can see for yourself, the unedited version of the image looks bland and unexciting when compared side-by-side with a professionally edited image.
Brand Identity
It is absolutely necessary to keep a consistent brand identity across all marketing and communications and retouching can be beneficial in doing the same, colored backgrounds, custom margins, unique approach to shadows – all of these elements can play towards your brand awareness.
Bridge the online and offline gap
Photo Editing helps in enhancing images and maintaining image quality even when they are zoomed-in, giving shoppers an opportunity to almost feel the fabric and see closeups of a product.
Cost Savings and Sustainability
Setting up a standard editing process for your company according to your brand attributes can help eliminate extra effort and costs that come with editing hundreds of images. This can be done more efficiently when you outsource your image editing requirements to an expert photo editing company, such as Picabees.
Improving Ecommerce Conversion Rates
It is estimated that approximately 70% of online buyers place image quality as the most important aspect of their buying decision. Photo retouching is a key enabler in making images look good and attractive, thereby persuading customers to purchase more often.
Here are some common photo editing and retouching techniques
Color Correction and Enhancement
Color correction involves adjusting brightness, contrast, and exposure to achieve optimal lighting, creating a well-balanced and harmonious image. Additionally, fine-tuning color balance, saturation, and vibrancy ensures a cohesive color palette that conveys the intended mood and atmosphere.
Background Removal
One of the most important aspects of photo editing in fashion photography is the removal and addition of backgrounds, your requirements might sometimes need that the same image be added against different backgrounds to suit the medium that they are being posted.
For example – The backgrounds of images might vary when you post it on your website against posting it on a third-party e-commerce site that has certain restrictions regarding background colours.
Skin Retouching
Skin retouching is another important area of focus for the fashion industry, skin conditions like acne, scars, tattoos can easily be edited out to suit your requirements, hence allowing you to hire models that match your brand’s identity without having to worry about minor skin features.
Detail Enhancement and Sharpening
It is vital to make fashion photos as realistic as possible, both models and their accessories you or your company is trying to promote. While sharpening techniques helps maintain a natural-looking appearance of the model. Enhancing fine details and adding textures to products in the images, adds clarity and definition to the entire picture.
Manipulation
It is nothing but adding depth and dimensionality to the image by replacing backgrounds or incorporating new elements. This is especially important conjuring the fact that actual images are taken in 3-D while the actual output is supposed to be in 2-D. This is where true editing mastery comes into play, to make sure the fashion photos look as authentic as possible to the customer’s eye.
As you might have read, this is a big list of services and they can all become an intimidating task and really expensive unless you choose an established service provider who is able to effectively meet all your needs under one roof while keeping your budget needs in check.
That someone could be us —- Picabees. With our decade+ years of experience in the fashion photo editing industry, we can truly help your brand establish itself and come out on top.
