What is Image Retouching
Image retouching has seen some controversy over the past few years. People are arguing that they look different in certain photos used by advertising agencies and other companies.
But image retouching has been a part of photography for centuries. Every photo you see in advertising has been retouched in some way. It is a fact of photographic life.
Image retouching is the simple manipulation of a photo through using a filter, digital enhancement, different lenses and much more. Even the developing room can be used to retouch photos through different exposure and developing times.
What Does Image Retouching Do?
The process of image retouching is simple but the subjects they work on is numerous. Skin is smoothed out, teeth are made whiter, breasts are made larger, legs thinner and cleaned up. That is just for humans. For objects the examples include, broken boxes made new again, car bodies smoothed out, highlights can be added, and much more.
In other words, the photo you see is not the photo that was taken originally. It has been altered in some way.
Skill Needed in Image Retouching
It takes a lot of skill to retouch a photo. One of those skills is being able to understand what the client wants. Retouching is not left to the imagination or preference of the photo editor. The photo editor must know and achieve the exact look the client is after
Another skill is to be the right retoucher for the job. You just can’t be good at photo editing to be right for a retouching task. You need to know what you are doing at all stages of the retouching chore. You need skill, experience, speed and knowledge to do image retouching.
There is still more skills that are needed to be a good retoucher. You need digital tools skills to retouch many photos. When you are doing digital retouching, you need to know where the image will be published. Each final destination plays a role in how images will be altered.
For example, you will need to know what kind of paper stock and ink will be used to publish a print image. These factors alter how you will retouch a photo. The print path is different from the web path and so on.
The Purpose of Image Retouching
There are many reasons why someone would want to have their photo retouched. A personal preference or a family squabble would lead some people to remove other members of the family from their family photos. Or an absence of a family member requires a different image inserted to the current family photo.
For tourism, prized locations are retouched to make them more attractive. The goal of the owner of the tourist attraction is to get more people to come to their business. In politics, those who have fallen out of favor with the leader are often removed from classic photos.
Then the glamour reason. Celebrity photos are often retouched to make them look more handsome or prettier than they actually look. Image is everything. There are a thousand and one reasons to retouch a photo.
Final Words
If you need a photo refinished just give us a call for a quote. We can handle any retouching task you have in mind. We do not care about the reason. We will handle your retouching task like it was for our own family.
There is no image retouching task too big or small for our company. We have the experience and expertise to provide professional results and meet your expectations.