Digital Photo Retouching - Is it Worth It?

You’ve seen the magazines at the checkout stand, the catalogs touting the latest fashions, the photographers strutting their creative image style and you know, albeit sometimes subconsciously, that the glossy pixel perfect photographs and beautifully proportioned models express but a fraction of reality.

And you ask yourself: "Is all that digital photo retouching work really that effective in selling products and services to the public?"

Yet, somehow you cannot get enough of it. Without even realizing what is happening, you find yourself drawn to things of beauty and you make purchase decisions based on how a photograph looks.

Not a believer? Consider yourself one of the stoics of society, uninfluenced as to how you make your own purchasing decisions? Well, believer or non-believer, you ARE influenced by a retouched photo.

Let me give you a personal example of how a simple color-correction by a master retoucher on a small, insignificant $10 product managed to pay for the entire production and printing of a catalog.

It’s true. It happened to me in the mid-1990’s. The same little dark red product image had been running in a catalog for several years. It paid for it’s space, but nothing more.

The image was color-corrected to the brilliant red of the actual product and, voila! Consumers bought over $100,000 of this little product within a week of the catalog hitting in home.

A company of any size might be convinced they are saving money by shooting their own photographs, especially in tough economic times. Or, a more experienced company may realize the necessity for a professional photographer, but might not quite understand that it is the digital photo retouching that really brings an ordinary, sometimes dreary image to life and enables the pixels to leap off the page. It’s the juicy images that inevitably sell the product.

Models and actors also find themselves addicted to their ever increasing need for a digital retouching master. One who is so expertly trained to reshape and enhance every salable aspect of their personality and body, yet can also keep the illusion of who they really are.

Professional photographers use digital photo retouching services to manipulate and enhance their own creativity as well as to save time. Having a Photoshop master on hand gives a photographer more time behind the camera and helps get the images into client’s hands faster than they can turnaround by themselves. It also frees up any worry of making an image look good on screen, but discovering too late that the image does not print well on press.

Even ad agencies, with their huge pool of creative talent, find themselves in need of a master image manipulator for their high-end clients. From behind the scenes, professional digital photo retouching will protect and enhance the agency’s reputation by providing expertly retouched images time after time.

So, is it really worth having a master Photoshop wizard in your pocket? Well, the answer is subtly "exposed" right in front of you everyday. In light of the products and services that are presented more effectively after their images are digitally retouched, I'd say the answer is an undeniable, unequivocal "yes".