Beauty & Fashion – Web & Print Work, Beauty Retouching

The following 3 samples are for when I did a short-term freelance assignment at Urban Decay in Costa Mesa, CA.

Urban Decay beauty Wet Seal beauty retouching fashion retouching

Freelance work at Urban Decay, created web elements for Beauty.com (Also worked with creating packaging while at UD, unfortunately I don't have any of those samples for my portfolio)

From here on are more samples of my beauty/fashion digital retouching work, shown as before and afters.

Short-term freelance work at Beach Bunny Swimwear in Irvine, CA included hi-res Photoshop beauty retouching. Below, you'll see this model had a bad spray tan and I retouched and evened out her skin tone for an easel sign promotion for a Teen Model Search (easel sign: 22" x 28").

Wet Seal Inc (Foothhill Ranch, CA): Weekly front-page web features were shot in-house of our featured model, Chanel (who has since gone on to be seen in magazines features and covers such as Seventeen, etc); she was often shot against a greenscreen so we could easily drop in patterned backgrounds or other colors as necessary. On the left: the original pic that was selected for the rotating home page feature, and on the right: the retouched version I produced (inlcuding a "hair swap" from a nearby image, as her hair looked better in another shot). You'll also see minor modifications also to the flow of the top, removal of clips, evening out of skintone around the arm/torso and very minor face/eyes/eyebrows modifications.

The following images here are from when I went to professional makeup artistry school for 2 years at Empire Academy in Costa Mesa, CA. Besides taking several intensive courses in Basic, Advanced, Photo/Runway/Bridal and Media 1 (SpFX makeup for regular and HD cameras including fake hair, bald caps, aging and prosthetics), we also had finals that incorporated photoshoots for our portfolios (with photographers that our instructor/owner of the school, Donna Mee, brought in). The images you see on the left were the final images we were given; it was up to us to make minor modifications in retouching as necessary to let the purpose of the makeup of the given "assigned beauty technique" shine through. Some of these models were from my own shoots, some are from fellow students, who I helped in retouching for the final portfolio printed piece.

Please note, I take special pride in removing shine, paying attention to small details, and making sure the integrity of the texture of the skin remains intact so that it never appears any retouching was actually done. But my final goal is to make the model look REAL, but still beautiful.

This model was someone I retouched for a fellow student's portfolio. As we were making up about 5 models in a 5-hour time span (including photoshoot time, wardrobe & hair styling, working with the photographer, etc), our instructor often told us that if we got a model with bad skin, to not waste time trying to "erase" all of the blemishes with heavy or cake-y makeup, but instead, just do the rest of the makeup as normal and the bad skin would have to be retouched out in post-processing.

(see notes from previous image)

The next 2 samples are small projects I worked on while freelancing for 2 weeks at Beach Bunny Swimwear, helping them prepare for Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Swim Miami 2014, and in downtime I helped them with other items as necessary.

4x6 invite to the Swim Week Opening Party in Miami (2014)

22" x 28" Easel Sign Casting Call sign designed for MB FashionWeek Swim in Miami (2014)

While freelancing P/T at Billion Dollar Brows in Foothill Ranch, CA, besides graphic design work, I also photographed the following campaign (before and after images shown side-by-side), did all of the retouching; and among other uses online, we also used these images on the Take Back Your Brows Kit packaging, seen below.