Professional Photo Retouching Services for Busy Photographers

Professional photographers are busy people. Whether shooting outdoor or indoor, they typically have to go through a number of processes – setting up equipment, adjusting camera settings, positioning props, and ensuring their subjects are captured perfectly. All these efforts require creativity and undivided attention. However, the time and focus needed to stay creative can often be hampered by post-production tasks, which photographers may prefer to delegate.

Post-production often comes as baggage that you must carry reluctantly. You may want to feel free to think and focus more on your core expertise, that is, photography. Photo retouching and image editing are often confused when it comes to post-production or post-processing. Before moving forward, it is better to have a clear understanding of the difference between photo retouching and editing.

What is the difference between photo retouching and image editing?

Editing refers to global adjustments, such as lighting, exposure, color temperature and cropping. It is often quick but sometimes can take several minutes depending on the desired final look of the image. Wedding photographers often take thousands of photos, which must be sorted and sifted before they can be processed. It is really a time-consuming task and distract you from the work that you love doing.

Photo retouching, on the other hand, is more specialized towards pixel-level editing. It begins when you run out of global setting options. While global editing alters an image in its entirety, photo retouching works on a specific portion of the image to correct errors, remove impurities and enhance quality. Obviously, not many photographers possess the necessary skills to retouch images. Even if you do, you might not want to spend hours in doing labor-intensive, monotonous work. You would rather love to hold your camera and go shoot the beautiful world.

Typical workflow of a photographer in Adobe Lightroom (LR)

Photography post-production typically involves carrying out global adjustments. Adobe Lightroom (LR) is a great tool for photography post-processing. A photographer will love it due to its simplicity, ease of use and intuitive workflow. Here is a typical workflow of a photographer in lightroom.

You will typically start with lens correction and go on to transform images with straightening and cropping tools. Next, you will work on exposure and color correction. Lightroom offers a slew of adjustment options and you require a bit of skill and experience to use these properly. Find the preferable neutral color to adjust white balance and create a perfect balance of shadows and highlights to correct lighting and exposure. Years of eye training and experience make this perfection come through. You must know what to change and how much to change. Luckily, most changes you do in Lightroom are non-destructive, which means you can easily roll back to an earlier version of editing.

Next in line will be to set contrast and color. Dodging and burning help you work on specific parts of an image and enhance the overall quality even further. Also, you may want to clean up a bit and sharpen the image to make it crisper and more attractive.

Although, it is a breeze to work with lightroom, you may find it counter-productive to spend valuable time working on non-core activities. Also, there is no option to carry out pixel-level adjustments. You might find it useful to seek professional support from an experienced retoucher and relegate all your non-productive work to them.

Working with a professional retoucher

Outsource all your photography editing work to a professional retouching company to save your time and increase productivity. A retoucher will leverage Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for typical Lightroom tasks and apply pixel-level editing using Photoshop. Retouchers usually prefer ACR over LR for image processing. While comparing Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom (LR), you can conclude that both uses the same image processing engine and the resulting images are, thus, identical.

Since both are similar in many respects, you don’t need the other if you have one. ACR comes as an extension of Photoshop, hence preferable to retouchers. Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) can help do things like tonal adjustment, color correction, sharpening, and noise reduction. Like LR, it never changes the image itself since it doesn’t work on pixels but image’s metadata.

ACR Post-Processing Workflow

One advantage with ACR is that you can save settings. As a result, you can edit one image, save the settings and load these settings for each additional images from that shoot. This approach is better than to edit each image individually and helps save a lot of time. This is typically useful for images that are shot-on-location under difficult lighting circumstances. Moreover, Adobe Bridge is often used to review and sort photos. Here is the typical ACR workflow.

Culling

Images are scored or labeled to filter out those that do not cut. This is a tedious and time-consuming process but can save a lot of time later. For example, photographers take thousands of shots in a wedding, but only hundreds are required for production. A large number of images are sent to the bin and this percentage can be quite higher for a new and inexperienced photographer. Culling helps save valuable time for photographers as well as retouchers.

Crop and straighten

Cropping is necessary to avoid corner and edge issues, such as high contrast at corners or horizontal and vertical lines close to edges. Use ‘geometry’ settings to straighten images, if needed, prior to cropping. Also apply profile correction using ‘optics’ settings.

Exposure correction

Adjust white balance and neutralize any color cast. Basic panel offers options to adjust the white point by automatically adjusting temperature and tint sliders. Correct the color balance, then go on to edit exposure, fine-tuning the shadows and highlights.

Set contrast

Optimize contrast while working with highlights and shadows. Make the images ‘pop’ with clarity slider, which works with midtones to add contrast. Also, work with tools to enhance texture. Quite similar to curves adjustment in Photoshop, ACR offers tone curve panel with sliders to control various parts of the tonal range.

Color

We can either apply the presets first and then work with contrast, clarity, exposure and temperature, or work with colors after having optimized all other factors. Based on your preference, we can apply LUTs and presets to give a pre-designed effects to your photographs.

Vibrance and saturation

Tweak the colors using vibrance and saturation sliders. Don’t overdo saturation, which targets the entire image. It is better to change it only slightly. Vibrance, on the other hand, focuses on the midtones and can give the image a dramatic look, adding life to it.

Sharpness and noise reduction

Camera Raw detail panel helps control sharpness and noise in the image.

Targeted adjustment

ACR offers tools for targeted adjustment as well. These may include red-eye removal, spot removal tool (which works similar to healing brush and clone stamp), adjustment brush, color sampler, graduated filter, radial filter, split toning tab, lens correction panel, pin cushioning, barrel distortion, vignetting slider and camera calibration sliders (which is used to correct a color cast). HSL/Grayscale tool is used to control hue, saturation and luminance. Spot removal tool can be used to remove dust and dirt.

Photoshop Retouching Workflow

Photoshop workflow may vary depending on desirable output. Typically, it revolves around the tasks mentioned above and fine-tuning them further.

Apply curves and work with highlights and shadows to improve contrast. Do color correction and color adjustment.

Next in line are saturation and vibrance, sharpening, and removal of impurities. Using spot healing, clone stamp and a number of other tools, it becomes easier to remove unwanted elements and imperfections, such as a zit and a distracting pole in the background.

Working at a more granular level, we can apply dodge and burn tool to lighten or darken specific areas on an image. Create adjustment layers to restrict changes to only a specific part of the image.

Frequency separation is an invaluable technique to avoid losing details while working with a healing brush. It helps separate texture and color into different layers.

We use gradients to create fading effects on skies in real estate retouching. Sometimes, we need to combine multiple images to create composites.

Why Collaborate with a Retoucher?

It is important to work with a retoucher because retouching is a dedicated job and standalone craft. A good photographer is not necessarily a good retoucher as well, so collaboration becomes inevitable in certain circumstances.

Leverage the profound knowledge and years of experience that a retoucher has to increase the quality of your final output.

Genuine retouchers do not use automated software, but prefer to work by hand. This makes the final outcome realistic, but requires lots of time, usually in hours, to bring in the perfection.

Even if you know a bit of retouching, you would prefer to relegate the work to someone else and save time for productive use. Collaboration also helps you focus on what you love and really good at.