Retouching for Excellence

There are endless YouTube videos and other tutorials on the web - a morass of tips and tricks that are not grounded in a concept or a way of working that helps define what kind of techniques are appropriate for your work. Look carefully at work done by photographers you admire, share your work with others, ask for critical feedback. Going to school to learn more about formulating ideas, a personal style, or a conceptual strategy will help. If that’s not possible, then it is my philosophy as a teacher to suggest that you follow the road of trial and error and a steady accumulation of knowledge about what you want. The point is to create and execute a standard of excellence that will set you apart.

In pursuit of this goal beware of trends, quick shortcuts, third party retouching plugins and algorithms that do everything for you in the background, when you have no idea exactly what what these tricks are doing to your picture. The before and after photographs below demonstrate my point. Color toning was done with client feedback on a BenQ Adobe RGB 1998 display. The retouching was all handwork, all eight hours it took to retouch this and two other images like them was paid by my client at the rate of $125 per hour. Most of the heavy lifting was Photoshop hand work - copying and pasting and smoothing. It could not have been done well any other way.