The advent of digital photography has spawned a secondary revolution in the art of post production, which is sometimes called retouching. In the days of film, retouchers worked with fine brushes, spotting, correcting and editing physical prints of images. Now, everything is a pixel, nearly infinitely mutable.

My personal preference is for a light touch, taking away just enough of what you don’t want so that even an educated observer cannot tell that an image has been altered. But at the end of the day, it is my job as a retoucher to execute my client's vision, not my own.

Soon I will have some videos of me doing various retouching and post production tasks as examples of what happens behind the scenes. But for now, these are the basics:

COLOR & CONTRAST Every image needs to be color balanced (sometimes known as white balancing) which means different things for different clients. For instance, in product photography obviously the color of the product is vital, and accuracy is the key. In editorial or architecture, you usually want the colors to agree across a set of images, so that they are all warm, natural, or sometimes even cool, although that is rare.

SPOTTING Much of what happens behind the scenes is simple clean up. With today's high resolution cameras, you tend to see every little scuff and dust bunny. Wrinkles in fabric and skin, blemishes on faces and fruit, the list goes on and on. All of it gets cleaned up.

SILO & DROPSHADOW A mainstay of product photography is the the silhouetting of a product and inserting a digitally created drop shadow underneath it. The silo-ing involved drawing a very accurate line around the image and using that line to remove the background. The product is then typically placed onto a perfect white background and a drop shadow inserted. This process can be automated, but the results are poor. I edit every drop shadow by hand. It doesn’t take that much longer, and the outcome is unquestionably superior.

COMPOSITION A lot of retouching is composition, where parts of one image are transplanted within the image or even into other images. In architecture images I might extend a hedge to hide an ugly neighboring home. In product photography, sometimes the samples that are shot have been sent around the world and back, and are all banged up. For instance, a fabric chair with a tear in the fabric. Copy a piece of clean fabric from another part of the chair, resize it and add some shading, and you have a chair that looks fresh from the factory.

Post-Production work starts at $100 per hour. Project consultations and estimates are always free.