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Rangefinder Magazine
May 2004

Profile: Glenn Honiball
Hi-End Retouching

Glenn Honiball is an image retouching expert. Since he started in the retouching field in 1985, he has done work for ad agencies, design houses and photographers. His work has been on web sites, newsprint and packaging. He also does personal photo work.

Two trucks The client supplied two images of this truck on two different backgrounds. The two images had to be merged together to create a single image. Many details of each truck did not line up, so I had to align them and integrate the images together to make them look like one image. I used the clone tool extensively throughout the retouching process with this image.

Glenn was born in South Africa in 1962. He moved to Canada when he was three and currently lives in Toronto. His father and grandfather were both artists. His grandfather was the first person to have a comic strip in a South African newspaper, and his father worked in advertising, photography, layouts and cartoons. His two daughters, seven and five, appear to have picked up the artistic genes—they love to draw.

Glenn went to college for graphic arts. He didn’t like it, so he went to small businesses and designed logos, did some photography, and prepared ads for them.

He has worked for numerous agencies and companies. Agencies include: J. Walter Thompson, Optic Nerve, Brainstorm, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Zig, to name a few. Companies Glenn’s worked for include such big names as Ford, GE, BMW, Coke, Sony, Kraft Foods and the NFL. He has also worked with photographers Dimo Safari and Ron Katz.

To do his retouching, Glenn primarily uses Adobe Photoshop, currently version 7. On occasion he may also use Adobe Illustrator to bring in a logo or artwork, but only when the project calls for it. In the past he has also used some 3D programs when he needed to create something that didn’t really exist.

The image of this sailboat was taken by someone standing on the bow of the boat. There were five separate images originally, and the final image had to combine these five to give the impression of one image. Of course, none of the five images lined up. To fix the image, I used the cloning tool extensively. I took much care to line up all wires and ropes. To brighten up the image and make the water more blue, I made a color correction with curves.

At the start of his career, Glenn used a Hell Chromacom system (a pre-press system similar to Scitex). It could do page assembly, color correction and retouching. Photoshop wasn’t around then, and the Macs weren’t capable of much. The Chromacom system was not as manageable as the programs of today. It didn’t have an “undo” option, and there was no such thing as layers. All of the commands were in German, and they were string-based commands. The system could cost about one million dollars, and retouching paid about $650.00 per hour (to the company, not the retoucher). Glenn worked on that system for about nine years.

Next, Glenn worked on a UNIX box, a Silicon Graphics Indigo 2. On that machine, he used a retouching program called Barco Creator, which still didn’t have layers. He also used a program called Alias Eclipse (from the company that made the 3D program Alias Maya).

I removed the radiator behind the sink from the original image with the clone tool. Then I had to recreate tiles with the clone tool. Reflections on many of the tiles were

According to Glenn, “Both of these were cumbersome and not as slick or easy to use as Photoshop.”

In Photoshop, there are many ways to achieve the same results. Glenn often has to work within very tight deadlines. These deadlines force him to come up with the most efficient ways of doing things without sacrificing the quality of the results. When doing work for an ad agency, there will be many art directors reviewing the work, so retouchers cannot get away with mediocre results.

These rings were retouched as per the client’s request. The rings were close cut, some diamonds were replaced with “master” diamonds on file, and many reflections and shadow casts were retouched with the clone and smudge tools to produce the final file.

With Glenn’s visual and artistic background and years of experience, when someone brings him an image to work on, he clues in very quickly to what they are trying to achieve. Glenn says, “I typically have ideas on what I can do for them as they are talking. If a lot is involved, I will sometimes go for lunch, and by the time I get back, I have a solution. It just pops into my head! I guess it is similar to a songwriter waking up in the middle of the night and writing down a melody.”

Once he decides how he will retouch the image, Glenn looks at what it will be used for. For example, magazines are different than newsprint or a billboard. At this point the technical side comes in. The print world is a CMYK world, and you have to know how to make the colors and the image as a whole look good on whatever medium it will print to.

Clients just want the end result to look great. They don’t necessarily know or care about ink densities, UCR or linescreen,” says Glenn. It is Glenn’s job, the job of the retoucher, to make sure the image and the end product will look good. He has to make sure the image is the correct linescreen and the ink densities are correct for the output medium, while trying to maintain the original look of the image. Many printers supply printing specs for their particular presses, and these specs must be followed to produce quality output. Glenn also works on packaging, which he calls “a whole other animal that can get rather technical.”

Thanks to computers, Glenn can work with customers worldwide. Visit his web site at www.retouch.ca to see original and retouched images.

The client supplied a flat image of a map and the car image. The client asked me to wrap the map around the car to make it look as though it been shot that way. I scanned the map in and multiplied it onto the car. Using the liquify filter I reshaped the map to the contour of the car. A color correction using curves was the final step.

The front headlight of the Lexus image was full of imperfect shapes and reflections. I cleaned up the final image and perfected it with the clone tool. Then I used the curves adjustment to adjust the color.

A new front end was added to this van to update it for this year’s model. All that the client supplied was the front grill and bumper. The new front end was shaped with the liquify filter to a small degree and color corrected to match existing the van color. With the combination of the clone tool and the erasure tool the new front end was merged with the older van.

John Deere logo: An Illustrator file from John Deere was supplied, and the client asked me to give the logo a three-dimensional appearance. Transform and distort created the desired angle of the logo. A hard mask was made and a highlight was brushed across the front of the logo to make it appear shiny. A shadow was created on a separate layer based on a selection of the main logo. I typically create shadows in black only, depending on the background color, so as not to introduce rainbow artifacts. Adding a small amount of noise to shadows as well helps break up any band ing that can occur.

Cell phone (right): The client wanted the hard reflection removed from the remote control, and I did this with the clone brush. Areas of the image had to be protected with selection masks to prevent the cloning from spilling over onto the buttons and logo.