What's gone wrong with retouching?

There has been a lot of debate regarding the subject of retouching in recent years and sometimes it seems like retouchers always get the blame. Nobody’s asking professional retouchers why they think this has become such a big issue, so here’s how it looks from my experienced point of view.

I started retouching my own photos by just spotting them at the age of 17 and later did a very successful exercise in retouching at college as part of my photography course. That was what sparked my desire to become a retoucher and somehow I found myself a trainee job in London in the late 1980’s after leaving college. When I started retouching professionally I was trained to use dyes and brushes on film and occasionally paper. The company I worked for, O’Connor Dowse, was very specialised and serviced all the top advertising agencies of the day. There were no other clients.

No photographers ever came through the door, they had done their job as far as the agencies were concerned when they delivered their transparencies and they had no more say in the matter of retouching. They were so skilled at fulfilling a brief exactly that they didn't need to be around anyway. If something had to be retouched because the photographer made a mistake it would often come out of their own budget.

O’Connor Dowse made the transition to digital imaging at a time when the computer and software cost as much as a house. I went from retouching hunched over a lightbox all day to working on a Barco computer - with only a one day lesson and a manual that had been vaguely translated into English before I was plonked in front of clients from advertising agencies. There were very few people around to learn digital imaging from, although I later went on to work with Erwin Keustermanns who was considered by all to be the digital retouching guru of his day. 

The clients who came to work with me were people who had always used retouching to create images that could only exist in their imagination and suddenly they were able to see it happening before their eyes. Okay it was slow and boring and there wasn’t a lot to see because the computers were so basic compared to today, but they could still make changes far easier than they could when photocomping was done in the enlarger. The pent up creativity that came out of those art directors was fantastic and we created mostly incredibly complex, impossible images. I very rarely worked on photographs of people and car retouching was a huge part of the work. 

Technically, retouchers had to know the entire process of digitally scanning a photographic image in high resolution, transferring it to the retouching system using half inch magnetic tape, converting it to a workable file format, working on it and saving it and finally outputting it to yet another file format to be exposed onto film using a digital image film recorder. The most common things I heard in those days was “What’s happening now?” or “How long before we can see anything”. 

The point of everything I’ve said above is that retouching has fast forwarded to become an instantly gratifying, mass pursuit instead of a technically skilled achievement.

I spent the first decade of my career with people saying “Oh, what do you research then?” when I told them my occupation and the previous decade with them saying “Oh yeah, I do that too.” And that is why I think we are seeing more and more examples of questionable retouching. There is a relatively cheap, simple retouching tool available to the world now with Photoshop and it seems that anyone and everyone can use it. And they do, because why pay an expert to do it when it is so simple to do it yourself? There are also more people involved in the overseeing of retouching and more inexperienced photographers who know what is possible, yet who do not have the foresight to imagine the results of their requests. They want to be right, that’s their job, so they’ll insist on what they’ve asked for even when the retoucher tells them it looks wrong.  

No–one can change all that and so I think it is up to end clients who commission photography, which inevitably means “with retouching”, to ensure that they accept and publish nothing less than credible work. 

Copyright Nicola Marshall 2010