Retouching Business Groups

Retouching Business Group Photos

A company last week sent me 22 group photos of its employees and asked for a retouching quote. The photos were shot by a professional photographer whose name was in the embedded Exif data. A quick look at this photographer’s web site showed that she specializes in actor headshots and fashion/entertainment events.

Of the 22 business group photos:

• Two photos were very out of focus. Why did the photographer give blurry images to the customer?

• Three photos had someone with their eyes closed. Why give these photos to the customer?

• The colour and flash exposure changed from picture to picture. If people wore mostly black, the photos were overexposed. If they wore mostly white, the photos were underexposed. If people stood under an overhead light, that ceiling light cast a colour on their heads. If they stood near a window, blue daylight washed over people nearest the window.

• Several of the images were crooked.

• There were reflections in eyeglasses.

• Many people were awkwardly posed. In seven of the 22 images, there was at least one person who looked like they weren’t ready to be photographed: their head or body was partially turned, an arm was moving, or they were adjusting their glasses. Why were these photos given to the customer?

• There were crooked ties, wrinkled jackets, open flies, half-tucked shirts, and open buttons.

The photographer obviously tried to fix the eyeglass reflections but their work was so bad that some people ended up with mangled eyeballs, an extra eyelid, a missing eyebrow, or deformed eyeglass frames. Yet the photographer still gave these to the customer.

It was also obvious that the photographer tried to fix some of the weird colour casts by desaturating the unwanted colours. But the work was very sloppy. In two photos, a person had their face desaturated down to zero – completely grey. Why didn’t the photographer notice this?

All in all, this was a very messy set of amateur-quality photos.

I quoted the customer about $2,800 to retouch as much as I could. But I said that I couldn’t do anything about the bad poses or messy clothes.

(Retouching a group photo usually costs more than a single portrait because each person in the group has to be retouched separately.)

The company refused my quote because they said it was double what they paid the photographer. They said they would rethink their plans for the photos.

Retouching Business Headshots

I also last week retouched (i.e. repaired) yet another set of business headshots. Fixing headshots seems to be a mainstay of my photo retouching business.

These six headshots (two photos each of three people) were taken by a professional photographer whose name was in the image Exif data. But the photos were terrible. The pictures were in focus but they failed in every other way. Bad poses, poor facial expressions, messy clothing, messy hair, and flat, underexposed lighting.

I looked at the photographer’s web site and it was filled with excellent product photos and wonderful lifestyle photos. But nowhere on his site did he mention or display any type of headshots.

It was obvious that this photographer tried to edit the headshots:

• All six photos showed enormous posterization which is an indication of extreme editing changes. Extreme editing is usually required to fix bad photography.

• The jpeg compression of these image files was so high that jpeg artifacts were plainly visible. The photographer gave the customer full-size, 45-megapixel images (there’s no reason to do this) and compressed those images down to about 600 KB. This amount of compression is much too severe.

These were amateur-quality photos.

I told the customer that a reshoot with another photographer would be the best option. But they opted for retouching. They said my retouching fee ($840) was about the same as what they paid for the photography but they accepted my quote. I spent about an hour with each photo trying to fix them but there was nothing I could do about the bad poses and poor facial expressions.

Stick To Your Day Job

Neither of the above photographers was qualified for the job they accepted. My guess is that they needed some quick money. It is a disservice to the customer when a photographer takes on work for which they don’t have the necessary experience. The customer may not know that a photographer isn’t qualified for a particular job so it’s the responsibility of the photographer to say so. But unfortunately some photographers put profit ahead of a customer’s best interest.

Photographing business people is not the same as doing actor headshots and event photography. The same equipment might be used but different skills are required.

Lifestyle photography is not the same as doing business headshots. Both involve people but the skills and techniques are different.

The above two photographers tried to do work for which they weren’t qualified. The resulting photos painfully showed their inexperience and that created unhappy customers.

Public Service Announcement

When I retouch images, I can easily tell which photographers know their stuff and which don’t. Pictures from the former type of photographer usually just require some polishing and that’s normal. But images from the latter type of photographer often need major, life-saving surgery and that’s entirely the photographer’s fault.

If you want your garden landscaped, you wouldn’t hire someone who paves driveways. Similarly you should hire a photographer based on their qualifications and not their low price.

If you want good business photos, hire a photographer who regularly does corporate photography. Part-timers and photographers who dabble in business photography do not compare to full-time specialists.

If you don’t use a photographer who specializes in the photography you need, you may need to budget hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire someone like me to fix your pictures. Even then, there’s no guarantee your photos will be fixable.