Someone sent a business portrait of themselves and asked for it be retouched. The person wanted the brick wall background replaced with “something serious or dramatic.”
What exactly does that mean?
After a couple emails, I learned that the customer thought the brick wall said nothing and had no feeling. The customer is an illustrator-painter and wanted their headshot to have a better mood. I suggested that it might be better to shoot a new portrait but they said it wasn’t in their budget.
Retouching is both technical and artistic
If you ask someone to decorate your home and don’t provide any further instruction, you’re at the mercy of the decorator’s intuition and taste. This may not be a bad thing if you know the decorator’s work and you set a budget.
Similarly if you ask someone to retouch a photo and don’t give any instructions, you’re relying on the retoucher’s taste and experience. This may not be a bad thing if you know the retoucher’s work and you set limits on how much retouching is to be done.
You wouldn’t hire someone to paint your home without telling them what colour you wanted. They can’t keep repainting over and over again until they get to a colour you like.
Similarly retouching can’t be done by trial and error. A retoucher can’t retouch a photo over and over until they get to something you like. Retouching instructions aren’t usually required to fix technical issues such as tilting walls, bad colour, poor exposure, dust on clothing, etc. But artistic retouching requires instructions or limits of what you want done. Artistic retouching, such as smoothing skin, removing wrinkles and blemishes, enhancing the sky, etc., can be limitless.
Retouching to the rescue
I created two new photos for the customer mentioned above. One image used a mix of textures and patterns to create an abstract background suitable, I think, for a person who runs an artistic business. The other image was intended to be a backup and it used a gradient-grey background which always works and never goes out of style.
Retouching is not magic. There are limits to what can be done if you want the results to look natural and realistic. When something is to be added to a photo, most retouchers will need a source photo to work from. For example, if you want clouds, trees or a green lawn added to a picture, then another photo with suitable clouds, trees or green lawn is needed.
Photo retouching is usually less expensive than re-shooting a photograph, assuming it’s even possible to do a re-shoot.
When it’s not feasible or economical to re-shoot a photo, retouching is your only option to fix, polish or enhance a picture that you’re not happy with.
