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Professional design work requires perfection. Anything less creates distractions and detracts from the message being communicated. Graphic designers, art and creative directors, and photographers do all that they can to produce flawless images, but their contributions are still not enough. Enter the professional photo retoucher, who works behind the scenes to make everyone else look—well—perfect. Because of this, the notion of a "star" photo retoucher is something of an oxymoron.
Recently, however, word of the exquisite work of one photo retoucher has made its way around the Internet. The site is filled with before and after rollovers of images from such high-profile clients as Ralph Lauren, General Motors and Nike. After viewing the online retouching portfolio of Brian Dilg, you too will appreciate the invaluable contributions these relatively unknown creative professionals make to the design process.
Graphics.com caught up with Mr. Dilg via email for an interview that sheds some much-needed light on the world of photo retouching.
Graphics.com: Did you also shoot the photos in your online retouching portfolio?
Brian Dilg: A few of them, as indicated. This page is intended to market my commercial retouching skills, so most of the samples are from clients' images. I never do as much retouching work on my own fine art images as clients typically demand—mostly color and tonal changes and almost no compositing—so they aren't as interesting retouching examples. I don't generally show before and after samples of my fine art images because I don't ever want the images to enter an audience's mind in any way except in their finished form. I'm very aware that digital "manipulation," as it has had the misfortune to be labeled, carries a negative connotation for many people, and I get tired arguing that all photography is visual manipulation from the moment the shutter is released.
G: What aspects of photo retouching do you find the most challenging?
BD: Hands down, hair silhouettes are the most time consuming and annoying task. It's extremely common for backgrounds to be completely changed, and preserving loose hair flying over a background with radical changes in color and tone takes a lot of painstaking work.
G: How much direction do you typically receive from the client? For instance, I notice in one example (shown at right) you've removed a small wrinkle from Anthony Michael Hall's shirt. In the Polo ad, you fixed the baseboard molding and even remove a tiny white speck from the natural wood. When do you know to call it quits with an image?
BD: High-profile advertising clients are extremely demanding, and usually have someone well educated about retouching to communicate with the retouch artists. They're in the business of selling products, so they want both models and products to look perfect. Typical markups indicate everything that should be deleted or changed: wrinkles, blemishes, misshapen fabric, ill-fitting clothes, distracting highlights—the list is endless.
Large clients deal with retouching agencies, not individual retouchers for the most part, so they don't leave much to chance. Products usually have to be represented with precise color matching, although a few more creative, interpretive campaigns come along occasionally that call for some creativity. However, the "look" of a campaign is set by the art director long before most retouchers get ahold of an image, so often you're following a preset style. Most established photographers have their own retouchers that know exactly how to achieve their visual style. As far as knowing when it's done, the client ultimately makes the determination, but knowing when to stop is an important part of retouching. It's very easy to go too far!
G: How much time do you typically spend on an image? What's the longest amount of time you've spent?
BD: It varies tremendously, depending on how meticulously products, skin, and so on have to be masked, the final reproduction size, how elaborate the compositing is, and high profile the image is. Covers and ads can get worked on for two to three weeks, while a small catalog image with a single model might get done in four to six hours. On big jobs, I'm typically working as part of a huge team of retouchers through a studio, so it's hard to estimate.
G: How soon can you tell that a questionable image is unsalvageable?
BD: If it was truly unsalvageable, I could probably tell you instantaneously, but the source photographs for the kind of high-end retouching I do are usually pretty well executed to begin with, and they're 95% digital, so if I can get my hands on the RAW file, I can do almost anything. The worst kinds of images are underexposed chromes with no shadow detail. Whether it's film or digital, once your shadows or highlights are clipped, you have nothing unless you paint by hand or composite in another image. I've dealt a lot with lousy scans made by inexperienced scanners that I've asked to have rescanned. Most of the problems I have to deal with are because people don't understand color management. I've made that one of my specialties, so it's never an issue, and it also raises my value—it's not so easy to stand out as a retoucher in an age where it's become so prevalent.
G: If anything, what won't you do to an image that a client might ask for?
BD: The client pays the bills, so the client is always right. Given that, they're hiring an expert, so if I see a better way, I'll lobby for it to save both of us time and money. I'm fortunate not to have been asked to do anything morally offensive, notwithstanding the fact that most of the retouching industry exists to sell products to women that they're told will make them look like photographs in which the models have been completely perfected digitally. The models themselves have, and will never look like their photos, no matter what they spend on skin care products. I do what I can to enlighten people by telling everyone I know what the realities are and showing them before and after images, but people seem to be very attached to their fantasies of perfection.
G: In some of these shots there have been a ton of changes to the set. Why don't they start with this in the first place? Is it a simple matter of oversight? Or is this a calcuated business decision in which a director knows what is most cost effective, based on a variety of factors, to retouch versus set up?
BD: There's a wonderful line from David O. Russell's movie Three Kings: "What's the most powerful force in the universe? Necessity." Digital set changes and compositing in post production have become commonplace. When retouching was unaffordable, everyone had to plan thoroughly and commit to a concept before film was exposed. Now clients and agencies know that everything can be changed, so when the pressure to make things better heats up, you see images redesigned even after they've been retouched. I think it's the opposite of calculation—even at $250 per hour, retouching is still far cheaper than reshoots.
I think it reflects basic human nature: if there's still a chance to put off the final decision until later, then you begin to rely on it to save your skin, so pre-planning is inevitably not as well conceived. In the case of something like the Nike image (shown at right), it was probably just easier and cheaper to get the players onto the college court rather than the NBA stadium and composite them together later. Avoiding expensive location shoots is a good reason to composite backgrounds.
G: How has digital photography changed your job or how you approach retouching?
BD: I'd guess that digital photography has probably had the most dramatic effect since Photoshop, at least on commercial photography. With the turnaround of digital, whatever clients might have saved on scanning costs is being spent tenfold on retouching. It seems to be a case of doing it because they can and because they have to compete with each others ultra-perfected images.
I still prefer film for its resolution, detail and soft shoulder on the gamma curve, at least with negatives, but that will change as the resolution of CCDs continues to climb. Digital photography has expediency going for it more than anything else, but you also can't beat the phenomenal latitude of RAW files as long as you protect your highlights from clipping. The RAW format is a great advantage for everyone, but there is often a battle between retouchers and photographers who don't want to deliver RAW files, knowing that the retouchers can completely change the look of their images. Of course, we can do that anyway—the RAW format just allows us to begin with the highest possible quality image. Being able to skip the scanning phase and turnaround time is tremendously useful; for my own work, I keep every digital image I've ever shot online so I can search my archives for whatever I need when I'm building a composite. The only problem is finding what you're looking for!
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