The most overlooked aspect of your business headshot — the Retouching
Since you need a business headshot, you might as well get the advantage of scientific photo retouching included with that headshot for maximum impact. Here’s what I mean: as a Dallas headshot photographer, I photograph many people at my portrait studio for a job-seeker headshot, or corporate career change executive portrait (an advancement, switching firms, winning an award, etc.).
For the job-seeker, their headshot is a big deal. That is because when 2 candidates for a job are very similar on paper, 90% of the time, the job will end up going to the one with the most professional-looking headshot.
That is because a business headshot, done right, visually communicates both the candidate’s willingness and capability to produce positive results for the employer, as well as their holding themselves to professional standards in the workplace.
Some people are sloppy and take their headshot for granted, when in reality many things have to converge to get a winning business headshot: the pose, the lighting, the expression/attitude… and the photo retouching. This article will focus on a Dallas photo studio with best-in-class photo retouching for business headshots and executive portraits.
Professional Headshot Retouching
My photo studio spends at least 5 times as much time retouching the headshot as we do taking it. This is the least glamorous part of the process, but the very part that is key to showing you at your best. We use a 3 software process to produce our sought-after results. Here’s how we help your headshot look its best:
PHASE 1 — Aperture/Lightroom/Capture One: first we import the selected photo (always shot in RAW photo format) into software specifically designed for professional photographer to process RAW digital camera files. We are making overall adjustments that affect the entire photo.
Here the exposure is tweaked to perfection and also the highlights (such as shiny spots from oily skin) and shadows are dialed in. I don’t like murky shadows in my corporate photography — like shadow areas on already dark hair, or if you have eyes that are deeply set in, or shadow areas on already dark blazers and suit jackets. If you have shadows in the smile lines on your cheeks or under the chin, those areas will also be lightened.
We also check the “color temperature”, as to the warmth of the overall photo. That generally translates into correcting if the headshot is too blue or too yellow. This can be affected by the colors you are wearing, so compensating might be in order. Different skin tones and if there are red patches (also sunburn) on the skin must also be taken into account and compensated for at this stage. We determine if the reds in the skin need to be shifted towards yellow, or if there is too much yellow overall — decisions like this are made here.
PHASE 2 — Portrait Professional. The headshot is then opened in this software specifically for edits on the face and hair. Expertise with this software is a must as things can be over-done, giving an undesirable, fake look to your photo. Many “filters” that people use on their camera phones apply this “overdone” processing and you don’t want to look cheap/fake or like you used your smart phone for your business headshot. And while this software can do effective wrinkle reduction and skin smoothing, there are multiple ways to accomplish that. What Portrait Professional software does easily that other photo-processing software does not easily do is:
• correct for being cross-eyed
• correct for one eye being higher or more closed than the other
• correct for many lighting mistakes (which will not be there to begin with if you’ve taken the photo correctly). It can change the appearance of which side of the face has the most light, etc. This is a feature we don’t really use as our lighting is carefully controlled before taking the shot.
However the unique benefit of Portrait Professional software is their algorithms for symmetry. Science informs us that most of what makes a person attractive is having symmetry to their face. The way we perceive beauty is often just 1 or 2 millimeters difference in symmetry — eyes on the same horizontal plane, both sides of your nose or mouth lining up, and so forth. The mathematical ratio of the distance between the bottom of the nose and the upper lip. And the mathematical ratio of the distance between your bottom lip and your chin. A small correction there will enhance your perceived attractiveness because our brains are finely attuned to noticing these facial features.
This software applies math-based corrections to enhance your face’s symmetry in subtle ways. My experience and skill at making fine adjustments at strategic paces on the face has the power to transform an ordinary photo into an extraordinary one! Of course you can mess up a face with this same software tool, so my experience and expertise to make artistic changes that are still your distinctive face has taken years of honing to acquire.
The end result is makes huge difference that still looks like you, just you at your most attractive.
PHASE 3 —Photoshop. Yes, only now do we use Photoshop and this is for:
- Taking out wrinkles in the shirt.
- Background. Sometimes this has to be exactly consistent between multiple corporate headshots. This includes removal of flyaway hair. This includes if vignetting or background replacement is needed.
- Teeth Whitening. There are multiple tools/filters for whitening teeth and our studio will not use any of them. They are sloppy and do not deliver precise results. We trace around each tooth, de-saturate the color as needed and ever so slightly lighten up the shadows. This is tedious, but the results are worth it as this is the only way to get proper looking teeth without distorting how the gums look.
- Decreasing wrinkles in the neck.
Conclusion
Retouching is subjective, but also incredibly powerful in influencing how your photo is received by your prospects and peers. Your results are as unique as your face. That is all the more reason to not overdo it or leave it to chance. Put your photography and its retouching into experienced hands of a headshot professional. In Dallas, the clear leader is www.DallasBusinessHeadshots.com with their portrait studio right in the heart of Dallas’ corporate district— downtown.
