30 Spectacular Examples of Photo Retouching
The Creattica inspiration gallery is another website in the Envato network that you may never have come across. The site features almost six thousand items of inspiration – it’s easy to submit your work, and the latest submissions are shown right here on the Phototuts+ sidebar! This post offers a taste of some of the exceptional photography retouching work you can find in the Creattica Photo Retouching Gallery.
Creattica Design Refresh
The recent Creattica re-design brought about a brand new, simplified layout, aimed at giving prominence to the amazing, inspirational work on display:
The New!
New Categories & Features
Today we showcase 3D, Advertising, Posters, as well as our old favourites: Business Cards, Logos and Websites. And with our redesign we’re adding a whole lot of new categories for Email Design, Mobile Design, Vector Graphics, Icon Design, Brochures, Book Covers, Tshirt Designs, Skate & Snowboard Art, and Desktop, iPad and iPhone Wallpapers.
Many of these relate to photography in some way, but the categories that might be most interesting for you in particular are Photography and Photo Retouching.
The new design also introduced several new features, particularly focused around finding great creatives to work with:
- Search, Follow and Contact Creatives
The biggest update to the new site is the ability to search creatives who have been featured in the gallery. Creatives can specify their country, budget and profession as well as provide a website and contact details. This could give you a great avenue for finding freelance photography work in your area! - Tagging and Colour Tagging
The new site now provides the ability to tag items with a set of preset keywords and colours. This will mean more ways to browse the gallery – once we’ve got some stuff tagged that is! - Extras – Badges + WordPress Plugin + Random Browse
And there are lots of little extras we’ve added including badges to show that you’ve been featured, a WordPress plugin to add creative inspiration to your blog’s sidebar and a feature to browse the gallery a little more randomly!
We hope you enjoy the new Creattica and get a wealth of inspiration from the amazing work of talented creatives around the world. If you have any feedback about the new site, the new design, the new categories, or pretty much anything else then Fill in the Feedback Form or leave a comment!
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!
By David Appleyard
How to Take Great Photos
Whether you've got a simple point-and-shoot, or a professional camera, you'll learn the basics of what every photographer needs to know to make their shots count!
Join our newsletter!
U-Design WordPress Theme only $35.00 
Modernize - Flexibility of W ... only $35.00 
Tinkerbell portrait retouching - More
Photo Basix
Just getting started? Start with our basix tutorials on the fundamentals. View All Basix Tutorials
Create a Tutorial, Get Paid!
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Phototuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
Wow and wow! These are some really good examples and truly inspirational! Thanks for the creattica link too. Never seen this site before but it’s got some really good work.
Now what you need to do is reveal the techniques. Looks mostly like gradient overlays, aibrushing and lighting work. I’m sure there’s stuff to learn though.
Right, I’m up for some retouching techniques lessons!
haha awesome
Am I the only one here who thinks that by removing all the skin imperfections, the subject looks fake and not beautiful at all? Just look at the skin, it looks like plastic!
I agree!!
This?
http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/8148/rtsb.jpg
(my first attempt in retouching)
Looks pretty good!
LOL! One thing I’m sure about now is, never believe in photographs
Some great pictures with nice retouching technics…but a few of them just overdid it. Some looks to flat and brushed with the blur tool. Those dont looking real..more like a drawing..its a matter of style.
Thanks!
Some of those are just scary! A few are very good. We need to be subtle when retouching.
Thank you for this as there are a few good examples of where retouching can improve a photography without over cooking it. But there are also some where it does not look natural and the original IMHO was better as it looked more natural.
I’m all for smoothing the skin a little to enhance a picture of a women but when you start to remove facial features such as moles, etc. then I think you are starting to over stepping the mark as this could insult the person as they may like the imperfection which makes them them.
80% of this looks like a mixed bag from a freshman class at a community college just learning how to use photoshop. 15% passes and the remaining 5% looks professional. I find no inspiration, only the knowledge that crap passes and we are okay with it. I guess it’ll be easier for us that are good photographers and photoshop users to get jobs. That’s a plus. Thanks for posting an online portfolio to throw mine against when I show clients.
You’re an ape, simple minded ape.
I agree.
There’s two that I would consider professional. Some are “okay”, but the majority of it is borderline massacre. A lot of it reminds me of when I was in my late teens and just starting to use Photoshop regularly; this is the level of work I was producing by “fiddling around”. While I was pleased at the time, it would take no more than a month when I looked back at it and realised how poor, unnatural, and cheap the images were.
I can imagine a small business getting excited about some of these, but not a major business or corporation seeking some sort of professionalism. They’re very inadequate and amateurish and certainly not inspiring or fresh.
Interesting list of retouch work, though I dont think all of them are spectacular works, a few standouts though
I’d like to know the techniques behind some of these. I think I’d use them at about 25% strength, compared to most of the examples, although a couple of the treatments I think are excellent. The HDR processing…I think that style of HDR is like painting Elvis on black velvet. Visually striking, but a dime a dozen and tacky.
Amazingg…
Quite a mixed bag of stuff here. Some really good work though.
Here is an experiment I had with photoshop compositing a couple of images together .. it’s not really ‘retouching’ … but it sure was a lot of fun and I was really pleased with the end result.
http://markos.co.nz/2010/05/compositing-two-photos-in-photoshop/
Hooray for plastic faces..?
Oh yess. Plastic faces beat it all.
-_-.
Some of those are really nice, but really just SOME of those.
Yeah. I hate it when all texture is removed from a person’s face, to the point where they look like a wax sculpture, and it’s called “spectacular retouching”.
Pretty nice examples here!
WOW! I love how simple changes can make such a big difference sometimes.
I honestly think there are much better examples of retouching. This stuff is pretty amateur.
Some brilliant photo-retouching examples above! I especially like the examples that use desaturation as means to bring emphasis to the pictures. Have just taken a few snaps with my d90 to see if I can learn a trick or two!
haha,the car is god damn hilarious xD
like many said before, at least half of them are way overdone or just bad.
Very nice work, but somehow a bit creepy. Like I don’t want to know what’s behind the editing, I’d rather think its real
Although I have some pictures of myself who could use some Photoshopping like this..
Some of them are really good done, some are not so.. Anyway, it shows the power of retouching very well!!