Photo-Editing
The question “are you going to Photoshop me?” is a super important one, so I’ll give it a good, thorough answer. When I went to my first professional Photoshop retouching training, my instructor said something like this, “We want to tell the truth in our imagery. As photographers, we have a responsibility to do that. When you were with this person, did you notice that line on their forehead or that dimpling on their arm? Probably not, you were probably busy looking them in the eye and being charmed by their personality. But when we freeze an image in a photograph and the human isn’t there, we start to look around and notice things we didn’t before — a blemish here, stretch marks there. And so to tell the truth about a person, we might eliminate those things we notice in two dimensions that we don’t notice is real life. But this is important — we want to only retouch to the degree that we’re telling the truth about what it’s like to be around that person. We don’t want to take away every feature that makes them who they are. We don’t want to add to the insane ideas that people have about what they’re supposed to look like.” This philosophy has stuck with me.
After all, what the world needs is to have beautiful photographs that normalize skin rolls and stretch marks and pores. But I also know that what I’m trying to do here is offer you a model-in-a-magazine experience that shows you that YOU can look like that too, given some posing advice, great lighting, a beautiful space, and yes a little post-production love. So my retouching hand is light as it finds a balance between these two things. I will always take away things that are temporary on your body — a blemish, a bruise, a scratch from your cat. I’ll always leave what’s permanent, like a beauty mark or your freckles. I might lessen darkness under the eye, I might smooth out some patches of rough skin or turn down the dimpling of cellulite. If I see a bump that I could have fixed with a shift of your body weight or a tuck of clothing, I might push that in. But I do not and will not make your body into a shape that it isn’t and you will not look like a soft, plastic doll when I am through. If you have editing requests beyond what you see in your retouched images, you are always free to ask for something specific. Some edits may incur an additional fee, but it’s very infrequent that I get those. All the images that you see in my web portfolio show “standard” retouching, nothing here cost extra to the client.
