From Shoot to Publication: The Life Cycle of an Editorial Photograph
Here we go — everything’s ready to begin. The producer is set, the creative has laid out the idea, the team has picked the photographer to make it happen, and together they’ve found the angles, the situations, the model. The stylist has selected the looks, hair and makeup refined around the narrative. The studio or location is locked in, the lights rented, the assistants ready. Production starts and finishes. And then we arrive — us, the Post-producers, or retouchers as some call us. Our job, one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry, is often treated as an accessory that isn’t always essential, even though everyone knows a photograph couldn’t live without it. I’ve always had the good fortune of working with photographers and professionals of the highest level, who enriched me with their experience and vision; I’ve never had to, as the saying goes, “redo a photo from scratch,” and the few times I was asked, I politely declined. Not because I wanted to be precious about it, but because the final result wouldn’t have met the client’s expectations, risking the photographer’s reputation — and ours too.
Files usually come to us through one of the many file-sharing services, often just the selects and a few plates for composites. Other times, for more complex jobs, the client prefers to send us the entire session’s hard drive so we have all the material and can choose what works best. One of the privileges of calling ourselves Digital Area is that clients know they’re in good hands and can trust us to understand what’s best for them. We always ask for RAWs, so we have much more room to maneuver in case additional processing becomes necessary. We usually plan for two or three rounds of retouching. A round is a complete pass over the images: the first is the base version with the main aesthetic choices, the second incorporates the photographer’s revisions, the third the client’s. There’s no preset number of hours per type of job — it’s our experience that tells us “these images need 2 hours each.” We’ve always believed clients prefer to have the tightest, most predictable budget possible, so we don’t bill by the hour. If a project takes an unexpected turn, completely different from what was accepted in the estimate, we like to hit the pause button and talk to the client about potential extras. That way everyone knows everything and there are no surprise invoices.
Our king is the photographer. He conceives the images, we bring them into the world. All our work consists of making his vision visible — which, if we’re lucky enough, overlaps with our own. If we had to make a musical analogy, we’d be the rhythm section of a band, the engine without which the solo photographer couldn’t get the crowd on its feet. The soloist takes the applause, we do the heavy lifting. Some of them — retouchers, photographers, or clients — ask for things that give it all away, that make the image look over-retouched and strip it of its spontaneity. Usually the photographer approves and the client goes along with his choices, because they trust him and chose him precisely because they like his eye and his vision.
Sometimes, though, other factors come into play and bring everything to a halt. Often it’s the more corporate sides of brands, who don’t understand much about communication but demand a say that isn’t theirs to have. When that happens, it’s painful — because, in the end, hierarchy carries its weight. The retoucher often has the good fortune of not having to manage those aspects directly, but always pays the consequences when something has to be redone according to new directives.
The retouching is done, it’s time to deliver the files to the client. We used to always hand over RGB for digital and CMYK ISO for print, always accompanied by color-reference prints. Nowadays that step is often skipped — because editorial uses can be exclusively digital, or because the printer will use the same ICC profiles we did, and for reasons of time and cost on simpler productions, prints aren’t made anymore. We used to burn CDs; now everything runs on sharing platforms like WeTransfer, SwissTransfer, and so on.
The photos are now “into the wild,” and if we’ve done our job well, no one will ever know we were there too. It’s hard work, but someone has to do it right — without ever expecting the glory.
PS. This post was written by a human.
