Retouching highlights on product photos
While you can get a long way in proper positioning of your lights to minimize highlights, sometimes it’s just much faster to retouch them in post. What would you rather do? Spend ages messing with stands and gobos and moving lights around, or, spend 5 minutes in photoshop to tame them down? Sometimes it’s just about impossible to not reflect your lights in the product, for example when it’s round or very curvy.
The way I do it I simply hit control+j to jump a new copy of the original layer, draw a selection around the speculars that offends on this new layer, bring up the gausian blur and adjust the radius to wipe out the specular. Sometimes before I do this I feather the selection a bit.
This works great for very smooth surfaces like glass and metal. But what if you’r product has a pronounced texture that the blur will also smooth out and make it obvious what’s been done?
Model retouching uses a great technique to smooth out skin, you simply blur the skin, then add back the amount of texture on top needed to make the skin believeable again, and it’s very simple.
First blur the specular like described above. Make sure you save the selection you draw around the specular. Now select the original layer that’s not been blurred, bring back your selection and hit control+j to jump a copy. Drag the copy so it’s above the blurred version. Put this copy into soft light blending mode. From the filters menu select other/highpass.
The soft light blending mode uses neutral gray to denote transparent, so everything that’s grey will simply not be visible. The highpass filter makes everything but sharp contrasting edges grey, the higher the amount, the more of the image will show through, so you want to adjust the filter so the amount of texture you want “escapes” and shows through. You can think of this technique as a sieve for the texture, the larger the highpass radius, the larger pieces of the texture can fall through the sieve.
Sometimes soft light is not hard enough so if your texture is not showing properly try the hard light, vivid light or liniar light blending modes instead.
