It's engagement season in Boston, and as a New England wedding photographer that means it's time to field a lot of questions from clients looking to know who we are and what we do. Yesterday, we got one really great question by e-mail and I ran quickly down the rabbit hole.
"I am interested in the digital basic package, but could not find what the additional charge would be for retouching on the digital images. What might that cost be?"
I spent much of my day Sunday going back and forth with a client about a hairline. It's unfortunate that we don't always look like the picture in our minds of someone with great hair, great teeth and great skin. In this case it was mostly the first category.
In photojournalism we're taught that pictures tell stories and speak the truth. You might get away with a crop here and a color-correction there, but to push around pixels in something like Photoshop was like making up a quote or fudging a few facts.
Portraiture is a different story, since you're not trying to find some objective reality through your lens but an artistic truth. Retouching helps a photographer reach that truth when posing and lighting cannot. With enough effort the banal can become beautiful and the real, surreal.
Unfortunately Photoshop can easily go too far. You see it every time you pass a magazine rack, dozens of perfectly plastic people staring out at you, all of the little bumps and imperfections sanded away until they all look almost identical.
At Ryan Richardson Photography, I try to find a middle ground between reality and the artistic truth. To arrive at that point, I have two rules that I follow for every photo I retouch to go on the blog or in an album.
I recently revisited an engagement session that I did last month with the intent of sending the client some high resolution versions of their top five images. Their wedding is next year, so I thought they might like some images to share with their friends that wouldn't worsen anyone's cataracts.
Personally, the images they chose were some of my favorites as well (and isn't it great when a couple and their photographer are in synch?) but they needed a little bit of punch up.
When people say that a picture is worth a thousand words, they are describing all of the little technical and artistic elements that make up an image. Part of that story is how your eye moves through a photograph and where it comes to rest. Normally, you want the eye to rest on your subject and not some incidental object that found its way into the frame in spite of your best efforts. Unless you're setting up a hunt and find photo for a live version of Where's Waldo, these intruders have to go make an okay image great.