more red hair (preview)

(Text below: an “unretouched” report on taboo subjects and some “plaintive blah-blah” about the retouching work, for those who are interested)

So, finally I finished retouching these large series. Quite a time ago I've already published a part of that photo session here, but the huge part of the photos was laying around lazily on my harddisk, and because it never said anything, I forgot about it :-)

Alicia is a lovely young woman from Granada/Spain who I can safely say has a lot more to show besides her fiery red hair and lots of reddish, smaller and finer curls - and is happy to do so!

By my standards - you know, I'm more the small girlish breasts type - Alicia has huge breasts. But, some time before I photographed her, she had much bigger breasts. So huge (I never saw them, but I can imagine) that they were no longer bearable for her. In other words, she had them reduced in size.

I don't know whether breast operations generally leave deep, large scars or whether this is just the case with the ones I've seen. We don't get any comparisons because without exception all photos of women who have had surgery (whether with enlarged or reduced breasts) are retouched - including the pictures you see in my series today. In any case, I found it necessary to remove these deep, wide wounds...

When a woman with voluptuous curves gains and loses a little weight, this also leaves its mark, sometimes very clearly, especially on the sensitive skin of a redhead (in the back shots you can clearly see how strongly her skin reacts to friction).

After all, many women's skin reacts with sudden blemishes during certain phases of their menstrual cycle...

In other words, after all this came together, I had a lot to do with the images in this series. So much so that I still haven't edited the images that I actually wanted to publish as a series for my Special Patrons and will only retouch them at a later date.

Retouching photos is a pretty boring affair (except when I'm in love with the model and can hardly see enough of her anyway - but with Priscilla, for example, there's hardly anything to retouch...).

While working on a full-size picture, I usually don't have the whole picture in front of me, but only a section, and even if this section shows something that could normally be arousing, I don't see the attractive body part of a desirable young woman in these moments, but only an area of colors, brightness and shadows.

For my work, I more or less divide the image information into color and structure and mainly correct the color. However, this color view with almost no structure is somewhat blurred per se (the sharpness is in the structure layer) and I have to focus on a blurred area with my eyes, which is very tiring. Only then do I switch back to the structure layer in order to make any corrections, which suddenly sharpens the image again and the change is again tiring for my eyes.

The work with its recurring sequences (opening the images, splitting into color/structure, drawing the window to screen size, selecting the working layer, setting the tools to the corresponding image section, scrolling the image sections up and down, back and forth, the same editing steps as for the 50 images before and the 50 following images..., merging the layers, saving...) is also mentally tiring.

With retouch-intensive images, I only manage 10 - 20 images per day, which explains the sometimes long waiting time between two published series (today there are over 100 images in total...). Then I have to do something else.

Well then, although working on the screen really does make up a much larger part of my work than the sometimes also exhausting, but basically rather enjoyable (and sometimes very enjoyable...) hours during a photo session, I don't really want to complain. Or just a little :-)

Here is a preview of the large series with 80 photos