The business of photography and retouching
Photo retouching isn’t just for portraits and business headshots. Any photo can benefit from retouching.
Retouching can fix technical flaws in an image. It can also enhance colours, emphasize details, and polish a photo to give it more impact.
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Retouching real estate photos plays a crucial role in enhancing the visual appeal and marketability of a space. Photo retouching is both a technical and an artistic process. It can refine an image to highlight the property’s best features and eliminate distractions.
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When selling a property, it’s more appealing to show furnished rooms rather than empty ones. Virtual staging services can transform empty spaces into decorated, furnished rooms. Virtual staging can even replace existing decor with something better.
But if you need to showcase the existing decor, virtual staging won’t work, and photo retouching becomes essential.
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Customers sometimes request that all facial wrinkles and lines be removed from their portraits. I smile when I get these retouching requests because I know the outcome: when the customer sees the retouched image, they’ll say it appears unnatural, with their face looking like plastic.
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If a man takes off his sunglasses, I can hear him better.
– Hugh Prather, US writer
Two customers recently asked me to retouch some of their vacation photos. The pictures included a mix of cell-phone selfies and professional shots. (When travelling to a popular holiday destination, tourists can often hire a local photographer to capture their holiday memories.)
In the selfies, everyone was wearing sunglasses and the lenses were filled with distracting reflections. Most importantly, no eyes were visible.
One customer had some family photos taken by a local photographer and everyone in these images was wearing sunglasses. No eyes were visible. Despite the people’s smiles, the absence of visible eyes reduced the emotional impact of the photos.
Both of these customers asked if I could make the hidden eyes more visible. Unfortunately that wasn’t possible.
Eyes are the primary way we express emotions and connect with others. Our eyes communicate our feelings, intentions, and personality, and they help establish a connection with others. When sunglasses cover your eyes, you lose that emotional impact, making the photo feel less personal and less engaging.
The next time you take a selfie or pose for a photo, whether on vacation or at home, remove your sunglasses. Unless you’re specifically photographing the sunglasses themselves, it’s best to take them off. Visible eyes make a significant difference in the emotional impact of a photo.
A customer had commissioned a small caricature of themselves and they wanted to print and frame it. But the caricature was drawn on an iPad and was relatively low resolution. The drawing looked great when viewed on a small computer screen but the low resolution only allowed it to print at the size of a playing card. The customer wanted a 12″x16″ print.
Simply enlarging the image made it look worse because it was a bitmap, not a vector image. Enlarging a bitmap image causes it to appear out of focus, with jagged edges.
So, I “retouched” the caricature by enlarging it 1,000% and then redrawing all the edges to smooth out the jaggedness. I corrected the blacks and whites to ensure they would print true to colour. Finally, I sharpened the image so the lines would print crisply.
Retouching a digital drawing without altering the original look can be tricky. It’s necessary to match the digital brush strokes, texture, colours and shading. The success of retouching depends on the drawing’s complexity.
My background is in photography not illustration. Retouching a photo is about pixels; retouching a drawing is about lines. Photo retouching should preserve the realism of the image. Retouching a drawing should preserve the artist’s style and expression.
You don’t have to be a great photographer, although that would be nice. Instead, you have to be consistently better than average. Over time, you will become more experienced which can elevate your skills to an expert level.
Being an expert is not about talent. It’s about putting in the time and truly learning something. For example, you can become an expert at portrait photography if you really learn about portraiture. This has nothing to do with raw talent or being gifted. It’s about putting in the time and effort.
As your expertise grows, so can your rates. The more you charge, the narrower your niche becomes. As your niche narrows, the more concentrated you become and the more your expertise grows. The more expertise you gain, the more you can charge.
It’s a cycle: expertise leads to higher rates, and higher rates lead to a more focused niche, fostering further expertise.
