Professional retoucher Daniel Meadows talks about all things retouching tools and workflow. Get industry insights from working professionals.
D Meadows Design (DMD) became what is now Daniel Meadows – High-End Photo Retouching in 2009 and has during that time provided quality commercial retouching services to clients from aspiring beauty, fashion and editorial photographers to some of the world’s biggest names in fashion, consumer goods, and cosmetics.
In that time, I’ve worked remotely and onsite for household names on projects from portfolios to 100m2 billboards, all the time keeping abreast of industry developments in style and technique.
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subscribe in your favorite podcasting app Spotify | Retouching is our passion! We love talking about techniques, tools, gear, the business of retouching and to totally nerd out on it. As photographers go on meetups and conventions to talk about lights and cameras, we retouchers often have no opportunity to get together and to talk. For that reason, we would love to start discussions and invite other retouchers to talk about our interests, our business
Daniel and I start this episode by casually talking about our April fools prank from a few years back when we released a fake tutorial on dodge and burn. The video course is still up and available for download.
People are still downloading this, and some of them are left frustrated. For that reason, we have published a blog post and podcast episode explaining the reason behind our fake tutorial and why it is still online.
We started by talking monitors, and Daniel is using a 4K monitor. We go over the advantages and disadvantages of more modern displays and the difference it makes either working on a higher or lower resolution monitor.
Wacom tablets are the industry standard for retouching and a lot of other creative work. Daniel and I are sharing our experiences with different Wacom tablets, different sizes, and for which tasks we prefer a display device over a regular tablet and vice versa.
Some people say you should calibrate your monitor every week to have it perfectly exact all the time. Some people, however, do not follow this routine, and it is not always necessary. There are scenarios when you want to calibrate before starting a job or when you have to match different devices and retouching stations involved in a professional workflow. Then it totally makes sense to calibrate. However, if you are a one-man-(or one-woman-)army, then you have to do what is practical. Calibrating every week on your single device won’t make as much of a difference as one might think. It is across multiple devices when it becomes increasingly important.
Keyboard shortcuts aren’t hardware to use, but it is a helpful tool in making you a more efficient retoucher. Everyone should spend their time learning the most common keyboard shortcuts. It won’t make you a better retoucher but definitely a faster retoucher!
Daniel prefers processing files in CaptureOne; however, he mentioned it is worth testing what gives you the best result and what financially makes sense for you and your business.
After processing raw files, you will have to decide on the right file format for you. We briefly go over the two relevant file formats of PSD and TIFF files and what the benefits and drawbacks are for each file format.
We are discussing what can cause lag in photoshop, mostly leaving you with a frustrating experience and costing you time and money in the process.
There are several settings in Photoshop, which can help make working in Photoshop a much more fluent experience.
One of the Performance tweaks you should always do is to activate for Photoshop to use your Graphics cards full potential.
