Beauty product retouching techniques

In today’s highly competitive world of e-commerce, product photography can make or break your online sales – especially when it comes to beauty and cosmetic products. The visual appeal of your photos directly influences how potential customers perceive the quality, desirability, and value of what you’re selling. 

That’s where photo retouching comes in. With the right retouching techniques, you can transform nice photos into stunning, professional-grade images that stop scrollers in their tracks. In this guide, we’ll cover essential beauty product retouching tips and techniques to help you create photos that drive clicks, boost engagement, and ultimately elevate your e-commerce sales. 

Skin retouching is one of the most important aspects of beauty product photography. When done right, it can make skin look healthy, glowing, and naturally flawless. In the viewer’s mind, beautiful, radiant skin is often subconsciously linked to a high-quality, effective beauty product – one that they will be more inclined to purchase in hopes of achieving a similar complexion.

Frequency separation

Frequency separation is a powerful skin retouching technique that lets you smoothen skin texture while retaining skin tone and details.

Frequency separation involves splitting the image into a high-frequency layer (containing fine skin details and texture) and a low-frequency layer (containing broader tones and color variations). By carefully editing each layer separately, you can eliminate blemishes and uneven texture on the high-frequency layer without impacting the natural skin color on the low-frequency layer. 

This technique preserves skin realism while selectively smoothing imperfections. It’s more precise than simply blurring skin, which can make it look artificial and plastic. With frequency separation, skin looks healthy, clear, and vibrant, but not fake or overly airbrushed.

Dodge and burn tools

Dodge and burn tools, when used subtly, can add beautiful highlights and dimension to the face.

The dodge tool lightens areas where you paint with it, while the burn tool darkens areas. By lightly brushing these over certain facial features, like the high points of cheekbones, down the nose bridge, on the cupid’s bow of lips, etc., you can enhance facial contours and add a flattering glow.

Dodge and burn mimic how light naturally hits and reflects off the face to emphasize bone structure. This creates the impression of healthy, luminous skin without looking heavily edited. The key is to make small, targeted adjustments and build up the effect gradually for a subtle, realistic result.

Adjustment layers

Using adjustment layers and masks allows for non-destructive skin edits.

Rather than editing directly on the image layer, you can create separate adjustment layers to alter things like brightness, color, and saturation. Layer masks let you control where those adjustments are visible. For skin, you might make a curves adjustment layer to perfect skin tone, then paint black on the layer mask over the lips, eyes, and hair to hide the edit in those areas.

Adjustment layers and masks are game-changers for non-destructive editing workflows. They let you tweak and refine skin retouching without permanently altering the original photo layer. You can always go back and modify the edit or opacity. This flexibility is key for dialing in flawless yet realistic skin.

Strategic frequency separation, subtle dodge and burn, and masked adjustment layers are powerful tools in the skin retouching arsenal. They allow you to perfect skin while maintaining a natural look. With practice, these techniques can take your beauty product photos from average to exceptional.

The eyes may be the window to the soul, but in beauty photography, they’re also key for making vibrant product colors pop. As far as makeup retouching goes, eye enhancement is essential.

Whitening and brightening the sclera

Whitening and brightening the sclera creates striking eye contrast that draws attention to eye makeup.

The sclera is the white part of the eye. Sometimes, it can appear dull or slightly yellow. Carefully selecting and brightening the sclera, either with the dodge tool or a curves adjustment layer, makes the eyes look clearer, younger, and more awake. This brighter white intensifies the contrast with colorful eye makeup, making products like eyeshadow, liner, and mascara appear more saturated and bold.

Our eyes are naturally drawn to contrast. By heightening the juxtaposition between stark eye whites and vivid makeup hues, you direct the viewer’s focus exactly where you want it – on the featured eye products. This Color Splash effect is both visually compelling and strategically smart for showcasing cosmetics.

Hue & saturation adjustments

Enhancing eye color with hue/saturation adjustments makes product colors appear richer.

Bumping up the saturation and tweaking the hue of the iris can intensify eye color, whether that’s making blue eyes icier, green eyes more emerald, or brown eyes more amber. Against this amped-up eye color, eyeshadow and liner colors appear even richer and more pigmented by comparison. It’s an easy way to make products look ultra-premium.

While these hue/saturation tweaks should be relatively subtle to keep eyes looking natural, the boosted eye color functions as a built-in “after” to show off how transformative the featured eye makeup is. It’s aspirational, enticing viewers to imagine how the products could make their own eyes pop.

Highlighting the iris

Adding highlights to the iris mimics how light reflects off the eye, adding dimension and liveliness.

Painting thin, bright highlights curving across the iris, often with a small brush on an overlay layer, creates the illusion of glistening eyes. It gives a sense of movement and life to the eyes, even in a static photo. These highlights also add depth and dimension, making close-up eye shots feel almost 3D.

Luminous, dewy eyes with crisp, glinting highlights are universally appealing. They convey youth, health, and vibrancy – all qualities we want associated with the beauty products we’re selling. The highlighted iris also acts like a tiny mirror to bounce light back onto the surrounding skin and eye makeup for added radiance.

Bright eye whites, intense iris colors, and strategic highlights are the triple crown of eye-enhancing retouching for beauty products. Leveraging these techniques thoughtfully makes the featured cosmetics – and the eyes wearing them – sparkle, smolder, and shine in a way that commands attention and spurs customer desire.  

Accurate color reproduction is crucial in beauty e-commerce to build customer trust by demonstrating that products will arrive exactly as pictured.

White balance

White balance should always be the first step in color-correcting beauty product photos.

White balance calibrates the overall color temperature of an image to neutralize any unintended color casts from the lighting or environment. It’s essentially adjusting the image to make things that are supposed to be white actually appear white. With proper white balance, all other colors in the photo, including skin and product colors, will appear as they should – not too warm, cool, green, or magenta.

Nailing white balance from the start creates a clean, accurate foundation for the rest of your color corrections. It ensures products will be depicted in their truest form, without any muddying color casts. Customers should be able to trust that the lip color, eyeshadow palette, or foundation shade they see in your photos is what they’ll get when their order arrives.

Selective color adjustments

Selective color and hue/saturation/lightness controls allow for precise adjustments to specific product shades.

Editing tools like selective color or HSL sliders let you target and tweak individual color ranges within an image without affecting other colors. For example, you could make the reds in a lipstick pop more, the greens in an eyeshadow look richer, or the purples in an eyeliner feel cooler – all while keeping skin tones naturally neutral. These granular controls give you the power to make a hero product color look its absolute best.

Selective color adjustments elevate product photos from passable to perfect. Being able to zero in on a specific shade and optimize it for vibrancy, saturation, brightness, and hue alignment with real life demonstrates an attention to detail that customers appreciate. It signals professionalism, perfectionism, and dedication to delivering exactly what is advertised.

Real-life comparison

Comparing product colors against real-life swatches or Pantone chips ensures truthful representation.

A good practice in beauty product photography is to include a physical swatch, color card, or Pantone chip matching the product shade along with the shoot. This gives you a ground truth reference when retouching to check the accuracy of your on-screen colors. By comparing the product color in your photo to the actual swatch and adjusting until they align, you can be confident you’re depicting the genuine color.

Using physical color references is like a quality assurance safeguard. It prevents you from getting carried away with creative color edits that could misrepresent the real product. Customers rely on e-commerce photos to guide their buying decisions. If the color they receive looks different than expected, you’ll likely be dealing with disappointed customers and costly returns.  

Precise, true-to-life color reproduction should be the north star of retouching beauty product photos. Between judicious white balancing, targeted hue/saturation/lightness refinements, and fact-checking against physical swatches, you can deliver accurate colors that build vital customer trust. Bottom line, your product photos must authentically reflect reality, not rewrite it.

While skin retouching is critical for beauty photos with models, product shots of bottles and packaging require their own set of retouching techniques to achieve pixel-perfect results.

Clean up edges and outlines

Cleaning up edges and outlines is essential for crisp, professional-looking product shots.

Products fresh out of the box often have small imperfections like scuffs, scratches, fingerprints, dust, or stray glue along edges and seams. Zooming in and meticulously erasing or cloning out these tiny flaws with a small brush can make a big difference in the overall polish and perceived quality of the product image. Crisp, clean edges convey attention to detail and brand refinement.

Sloppy edges and visible product defects, no matter how minor, can cheapen the impression of your beauty products and make them feel low-quality or carelessly made. Consumers want to feel like they’re buying a pristine, perfect item, not something that looks rough around the edges or mishandled. Taking the time to refine outlines shows you’re selling top-shelf goods.

Enhance “hero images”

Enhancing “hero images” on packaging with localized adjustments draws focus to key branding elements.

Most beauty product packaging features a main “hero image” – the central product photo, logo, or graphic that’s the focal point of the design. Selectively bumping up the vibrance, contrast, or sharpness of this hero image, whether it’s a liquid lipstick swatch, a face cream texture, or a glamour model shot, can help it command attention and look extra compelling compared to supporting background graphics. 

In product photos, the packaging itself acts like a mini-advertisement for your brand. You want the hero imagery to pop and really sell that aspirational beauty benefit or experience at a glance. Drawing the eye to linger on your focal point longer builds a stronger emotional connection and motivates customers to want that product feeling for themselves.

Perfecting reflections

Perfecting reflections, shadows, and surfaces takes product realism to the next level.

Thoughtfully highlighting or shadowing the contours and ridges of a cosmetic jar or bottle can make it look more three-dimensional and tangible, as if the customer could reach out and grab it. Adding glossy reflections to shiny metallic or glass elements makes them feel luxe and expensive. Smoothing fingerprints off of matte surfaces keeps the presentation feeling stylish and professional versus smudged and messy.

Nailing the subtleties of a product’s surfaces, shadows and reflections can be the difference between a flat, artificial-looking photo and one that feels like the real deal. Customers should be able to clearly envision the product’s materials, textures, and finishes, as if they’re holding it in their hands. That level of photorealism builds trust that what you see is what you’ll get.

Retouching bottles and packaging is all about refinement – polishing away imperfections, emphasizing the hero, and accurately depicting the tactile qualities of the product to create an ultra-realistic, ultra-desirable photo. A flawlessly executed product shot conveys luxury, quality, and pride in your beauty brand. So while it may be tempting to settle for “good enough,” going that extra mile in retouching can be the key to elevating customer perceptions and boosting buyer confidence in your products.

While traditional beauty photography and retouching will always have a place, cutting-edge CGI (computer-generated imagery) is emerging as an efficient, cost-effective, and ultra-creative alternative.

CGI streamlines production

CGI product photography streamlines the production process, saving time and money.

With CGI, you don’t need to coordinate complex photoshoots with models, makeup artists, lighting equipment, and studio space. You can render flawless images of your beauty products in a fraction of the time, without the logistical hassles and expenses of traditional photography. Changes and variations are also much quicker and easier to generate with CGI versus reshooting.

For beauty brands looking to churn out large volumes of e-commerce visual content quickly and affordably, CGI can be a game-changer. It democratizes access to sophisticated product photography by dramatically lowering the barriers to entry. Even small indie brands can now afford to produce stunning, professional-grade images that rival top beauty retailers.

Total creative control

CGI allows for greater creative flexibility and control compared to live-action photography.

CGI empowers you to visualize products and their ingredients in imaginative, larger-than-life ways that would be difficult or impossible to capture with a camera. Want to show flower petals, droplets, or swirls of cream bursting out of your face cream jar? CGI can make it happen flawlessly and consistently across all images. You have complete control over every detail, from surfaces and shadows to reflections and effects.

The creative possibilities with CGI for beauty products are virtually endless. It unleashes opportunities to tell richer product stories, convey key benefits visually, and spark customer curiosity and desire. By transporting viewers into aspirational CGI “beauty worlds,” you can create an immersive visual experience that regular photos simply can’t match.

CGI product photography looks the same

Photorealistic CGI can be indistinguishable from live-action beauty photography.

Today’s state-of-the-art 3D modeling and rendering software, like that used by Welpix, can produce images that are virtually identical to high-end cosmetics photos. Every texture, reflection, shadow, and nuance can be meticulously crafted to match the real products, down to the last detail. Most customers would never guess they’re looking at a computer-generated image.  

Being able to create CGI images that are imperceptible from traditional photos is a major advantage. It means beauty brands can opt for efficient, economical CGI without sacrificing the photorealistic look that customers expect from premium products. With expertly executed CGI, you get the best of both worlds – visual quality and production agility.

CGI is an exciting new frontier for beauty product photography in e-commerce. As a faster, more flexible, and cost-effective alternative to traditional beauty photography and retouching, it offers significant benefits for brands looking to scale high-quality visual content creation. In head-to-head comparisons, top-tier CGI can stand up to the photorealism of live-action cosmetics photos. 

However, traditional photography and retouching aren’t going away anytime soon. Many brands will adopt a hybrid approach – leveraging CGI for certain products or campaigns while continuing to photograph others conventionally. Retouching skills like color correction, skin perfecting, eye enhancement, and detail refinement still very much apply with computer-generated images. 

Ultimately, CGI is another powerful tool in the visual storytelling toolbox, not a one-size-fits-all replacement for conventional photography. Its effectiveness will hinge on the quality of the 3D assets and behind-the-scenes retouching talent – which is why partnering with a reputed provider like Welpix is key. 

In the hands of experienced professionals, CGI can take your beauty product visuals to the next level, helping you reduce costs, improve speed to market, and push creative boundaries to stand out from competitors. So while mastering photography-based retouching is essential, forward-thinking beauty brands should also explore the potential of photorealistic CGI to revolutionize their e-commerce imagery. The (augmented) future looks beautiful indeed.