No before images for this one sorry, as I didn’t seek permission from the photographer (Maëva Anne-Blanche – https://www.manavagency.com/ – hello@manavagency.com). Hope you don’t mind!

The moment I saw this image up for retouch on Model Mayhem by Maëva, I just had to pounce! The colours, the scenery – it just blew my mind.

For this image, Maëva was looking for a few specific things in her brief – contrast and colouring, skin retouching and refining of the model’s silhouette as well as retouching the dress and hair details. There was to be more movement incorporated into the skirt of the dress, and removal of some distracting areas.

I tried my very best to hit all these points.

Originally I had two different versions of the colour grading – however Maëva prefered the second version, which you can see below:

I had a great deal of fun doing this image. I admit, I focused a lot on the contrasts between the dress, model, and sky. This was achieved by using a complimentary colour scheme (the red dress and the cyan sky), saturation (I desaturated the sky a tad, and increased the saturation of the dress to steal attention), and lightness (I made the sky lighter than the model).

I tried to tan the model like Maëva had indicated in her moodboard, but I felt that she was getting lost in the image, so I refrained from doing that.

I think, looking back on it with fresh eyes, that I could have done the far right hand corner of the dress better. The movement at the moment doesn’t look quite right to me, and it’s certainly, to me, not as dynamic as other retoucher’s offerings on the thread. However, I believe in time I will improve – and well, I had a hell of a time trying to find an image of a dynamic piece of fabric with the same lighting direction.

If you have any suggestions on how I could further improve this piece, please let me know below!

Hope you’re having a great day, and until next time take care.

Cheers,
Katy