Cheating at photo re-touching

Photo re-touching?

While on holiday back in 2015, I picked up an entry level DSLR camera at Gatwick airport. It was an impulse buy but one that paid off. Over the years I've taken a lot of photos with that camera on various holidays and photo walks.

In the early days I was dead set against any kind of digital retouching. It somehow felt like cheating. But the more photo's I've seen taken by professional photographers, it's obvious that everyone retouches their photos. You look at a photograph and see the incredible contrast and depth of colours, especially in sky's and you think, there's no way, with all the skill in the world and the best equipment that you could capture that.

But does it really matter? I've come to the conclusion that at its core, I just want to capture an interesting scene or moment in time. It's all about capturing what I see through the lens and relaying to the viewer of the photo, even if I don't have the skills to capture it exactly as I see it. Physically framing the shot and capturing a clear image seem to be key. Exposure and colours can be tweaked afterwards.

So, I played around with retouching - mainly using darktable, a great free RAW photo enhancing tool that lets you adjust exposure and things like lens correction. It certainly improved my photos. But like many tools, it requires a lot of time, effort, and knowledge to get really good results.

AI Photo retouching

By chance I came across a company called Skylum that make AI photo retouching tools. There was a deal for their older products on Humble Bundle so I thought I'd give it a try. I was absolutely blown away by what their software could do with virtually no effort.

In particular, an application called Photolemur. You simply open an image or a folder of images and it automatically runs them through its re-touching algorithm. Other than being able to tweak the strength of the adjustment and choosing between a couple of different profiles, that's' pretty much all there is to it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are other similar tools, and professionals that can do a much better job with Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom and the like. And there were a small number of photos that didn't come out very well - mostly taken at night. But for something that's almost completely automatic, the results where amazing - the colours, contrast, sky's.

And that's pretty much the point. As technology progresses, the tools are getting better and better at recovering underwhelming photos. Photos that don't do the original scene justice. AI is being used to automatically re-touch photographs. The AI knows what humans like to see, how to adjust colours, recognising the sky and re-touching it. I read somewhere that the iPhone automatically applies similar post-processing. Which helps to explain why iPhone photos look so great, even compared to photos taken on professional cameras!

After getting great results with Photolemur I've progressed to their latest product, Luminar Neo. It's a bit more like Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom, there are a lot of tweaking options, many AI assisted. Just using 4 or 5 options, you can really improve a photo.

You can see from the photo's above that Photolemur has done a great job of re-touching the image and it did it 100% automatically. I'm no re-touching expert and you can see my version on the right isn't all that much better than the automated version! You can see more examples of my poor re-touching skils on my Instagram.

So, I'd certainly recommend Photolemur, especially if you want to bulk re-touch images. Perhaps use Luminar Neo for specific photos that need that extra human touch. No doubt there are other similar or better tools out there. I'm very happy that I discovered Photolemur and Luminar Neo!

And no, before you ask, I don't work for Skylum nor am I paid in any way to promote their products! As if this website has any reach at all :)