What is Retouching?

Quite a few of my clients have asked me: What's Retouching? 

Is it applying a filter over the photo? 

The answer is 'Gosh No!'

Retouching is making fine adjustments to your photo to make it as perfect as possible.

When I retouch, this is the checklist I go through:

• Remove any background distractions,
• Fine tune family's skin tones (so that one person isn't significantly redder or yellower than other members of the family),
• Remove fine hair over face,
• Remove fine flyaway hair only if they're too distracting (I dislike over-smoothing the hair edge, because that looks really unnatural.)
• Remove snots, drools, pimples, scratches, bruises, bandaids (if requested), 
• Remove double-chin for adults (if requested),
• Slight slimming for women (if requested),
• Reduce wrinkles (if requested),
• Remove shine on faces,
• Slight skin smoothing for women, 
• Reduce dark circles under eyes,
• Remove redness in eyes,
• Whiten teeth (very subtle, matching adult's teeth to their children's pearly whites),
• Fine tune brightness/contrast to preserve details on very bright or very dark clothing,
• Fine tune colour adjustments,
• And any specific client requests. 

It takes me between 20 minutes to well over an hour to retouch a photograph.

The changes are super subtle, but they take your photographs from 'good' to 'wow'!