Professional Photo Retouching

Retouching or restoration?

The two get used interchangeably and they are different jobs, which matters because they are priced differently and briefed differently.

Restoration repairs damage: tears, creases, water marks, missing corners, silvering, the fading of an old print. The goal is to return the photograph to how it looked when it was made. That work lives here.

Retouching starts from an undamaged photograph and improves it. The goal is not to restore something lost but to remove what distracts: a blemish that appeared on the day, a stray reflection, an exit sign behind the bride's head, a colour cast from mixed lighting, the person at the edge of the frame nobody wanted in the shot.

Plenty of jobs are both, and there is no premium for saying so - a 1950s portrait with a crease through it and a distracting background gets both treatments in the same pass.

Retouching for print is a different standard to retouching for screen

A photograph that looks flawless on a phone can fall apart at A2, and this catches people out constantly - particularly with images that have already been "done" for social media.

The reason is simple arithmetic. A phone shows a photograph a few centimetres across. A framed print might be sixty. Every flaw is magnified by the same factor as everything else, and a handful of them only become visible once they cross that threshold:

• Sensor dust. Invisible at screen size, unmistakable as soft grey spots across a large sky.
• Compression artefacts. The blocky halos around high-contrast edges that a heavily saved JPEG carries. Enlarging enlarges those too.
• Over-sharpening. Sharpening tuned for a screen leaves bright outlines around edges that read as a halo in print.
• Heavy-handed skin work. Smoothing that looks clean on a phone reads as plastic at print size, because the print has enough resolution to show that the texture is missing.
• Noise. High-ISO grain that reads as texture on screen can read as mottling across a large flat area.

Retouching for print means working at the size the print will actually be, and checking at 100% rather than at fit-to-window. It also means sharpening last and for the specific output, since what a textured cotton rag needs is not what a smooth baryta needs.

How far to go

Portrait retouching has a line in it, and where that line sits is the client's call rather than ours - but it is worth deciding deliberately instead of discovering it in the proof.

Our default is conservative: remove what was temporary, keep what is permanent. A spot that would have gone in a fortnight, a stray hair, a bra strap, a reflection in glasses - those are the day's accidents, not the person, and taking them out is uncontroversial. Lines, freckles, scars and the shape of a face are the person, and removing them produces a picture that the family quietly does not like without always being able to say why.

That is a default, not a rule. Commercial and editorial work often wants more, and some clients want a portrait taken back a decade. Tell us and we will do it. What we will not do silently is smooth someone into a stranger.

What to send

• The largest original you have - the raw file if there is one, otherwise the full-size export. Not the version resized for Instagram.
• The unedited version where possible. Undoing someone else's filter costs more than starting clean.
• A note on what bothers you. "Remove the sign", "even out the skin tones", "get rid of the person on the left" is a far better brief than "make it look nicer", and it keeps the hours down.
• The intended print size, so the work is done to the right standard.