Photo Editing Services
Photo Editing Services or “Photo retouching” can be a misunderstood concept sometimes. I this article I will explain what goes into a good clean photo edit and what might be the limits of what can be done.
After and Before
Here we have a connector module I shot for Gore’s Aerospace division. If you click on the slider to see the “Before” option you will see lots of flaws. Additionally you will notice the background is closer to a white color. Initially at the shoot the client was leaning toward a traditional “on white” look, but as the post processing phase began it became more favorable for a grey and white gradated look. This decision to me made the most sense. It took a bland looking image and made it into something with more “Zaz”. Often times in the arts we are looking to find the most evocative image we can. This can be subtle balance when dealing in the corporate “safe” world.
On a scale from 1-10 I would consider this a 7 as far as retouching goes. The grooves on the green apparatus being the most challenging to tackle. The hardest part sometimes can be o create something when it isn’t there. In this case the paint had been eroded from the coupling housing. What this took was for me to go in and match the color and basically paint in where there was no paint. This sounds simple but the hard part really is to make it look real and not cheesy or fake.
When Retouching intensifies
Here we have a nice finished image of a spool of transparent film material. This seems like a simple shot. It doesn’t even look that perfect. But if you look below you will see the raw image before any photo editing services or retouching were applied and it makes a big difference. For this shot I needed to create a hollow looking area and get rid of the tape that looked crappy on the spool. Additionally I didn’t want anything to look too fake so I didn’t go too wild with the actual film retouching. There are still a few wrinkles here an there but this image was very challenging.
Another example
Ill use this next example to illustrate the difference between a raw and a “developed” photo. I get it sometimes people will ask me if they can have the raw files. My answer is always you don’t want the raw files. I could see it taking the place of the old film negatives but its a false equivalency for a couple reasons.
Below I have closer to what a Raw image looks like. Its generally darker and less polished. In addition all of the flaws are still there. Generally my deliveries are hi res and color corrected jpegs. These are what you usually want.
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