Photo via Time.com – credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
In the world of photo retouching Pascal Dangin, the head of of Box Studios in New York City, is a rock star. He is what’s referred to as a “Master Retoucher” – the best there is – and has worked with such famed photogs as Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel and Craig McDean.
Sopranos “Last Supper” Ad – photos by Annie Leibovitz, retouching by Pascal Dangin. All the actors were shot either individually or in groups of 2 or 3 by Leibovitz and the entire image was assembled by Dangin.
He brings photo retouching to a higher level – almost giving images an artistic quality - and should not be confused with those who hack apart images for certain magazine covers. Here’s a brief snippet from a recent article in the New Yorker on Dangin…
The obvious way to characterize Dangin, as a human Oxy pad, is a reductive one—any art student with a Mac can wipe out a zit. His success lies, rather, in his ability to marry technical prowess to an aesthetic sensibility: his clients are paying for his eye, and his mind, as much as for his hand. Those who work with Dangin describe him as a sort of photo whisperer, able to coax possibilities, palettes, and shadings out of pictures that even the person who shot them may not have imagined possible. To construct Annie Leibovitz’s elaborate tableaux—the “Sopranos” ads, for example—he takes apart dozens of separate pictures and puts them back together so that the seams don’t show. (Misaligned windows are a particular peeve.) He has been known to work for days tinting a field of grass what he considers the most expressive shade of green. “Most green grass that has been electronically enhanced, you know, you look at it and you get a headache,” Dangin said recently. He prefers a muted hue—“much redder, almost brown in a way”—that is meant to recall the multilayered green of Kodachrome film.
If you are a newbie or even consider yourself pretty advanced at Photoshop, be sure to read one or two if the articles on Dangin linked below. They are even good reads for those with no Photoshop experience at all, but who are interesed in subject of image retouching.
Recommended articles on Pascal Dangin: The Age | New Yorker | Time Magazine | New York Times
{ 1 comment }
I love this website Mick!!
I had a feeling that the Palin bikini image was shopped, but the copy I got was such a low resolution I couldn’t tell for sure. Can’t wait to show Bill.
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