In the fashion, beauty, commercial photography world, spending 8 hours editing one single image is commonplace. I’ve heard some take upwards of 12-30 hours an image. For a wedding photographer who handles thousands of images and is expected to deliver 600-800 per wedding, thinking about spending that much time on one image is enough to give me hives!
[REWIND: HOW TO HEAL & CLONE NON-DESTRUCTIVELY IN PHOTOSHOP]
Jeff Rojas is a portrait and fashion photographer based in New York City and in the following video, he challenges himself to see how much retouching he could do (reasonably) in 6 minutes. He called it the “dirty edit challenge” because the photo is edited to be “good enough” for the average client. In 6 minutes, without using plugins, Jeff cleaned up hair and blemishes and enhanced the facial features and makeup. He also challenges you to try the 6 minute dirty edit challenge.
Don’t look at me. It takes me about 2 minutes to edit a photo – throw an action on it and move on to the rest of the million images that needed to be done yesterday– the wedding photographer’s very, very dirty edit…which is why I sit back in awe of the the perfection and diligence that comes from my commercial photography friends.
Jeff Rojas has a few other editing/retouching videos on his Vimeo, including a very interesting 25 minute beauty edit. You can see more of his work on his website as well.
To learn more about retouching from an amazing retoucher, check out CREATIVE RETOUCHING ESSENTIALS IN A DAY EBOOK BY JULIA KUZMENKO MCKIM available in the SLR Lounge store.
[Via ISO1200 and Jeff Rojas on Vimeo/Images via screencaps]