How to Choose a Retoucher
There are many factors that can tip the choice toward one professional over another. The first of all is certainly financial. If you’re a rising brand, still in your early days, with no budget to dedicate to this very important part of your asset production, the best way to find someone who can satisfy you is certainly a freelancer. Since retoucher and photographer have always gone hand in hand, it’ll be your photographer who proposes their own retoucher, and generally that’s the right call to know what to expect in terms of the final product and of budget too. If instead you already have the photos but not the retoucher, because either you don’t trust the photographer’s one, or they’re busy, or whatever, and you want to pick one yourself, please consider a few things.
If you walk into a Ferrari dealership, don’t ask for a discount because you’ve got the budget for a Toyota Corolla. It sounds obvious, but I assure you it isn’t. “Fast and good,” in our trade, rarely go together. Or rather, they can, but they cost, and a lot. If you need retouching that’s precise, fast, and over the top, expect Ferrari prices, and don’t waste time asking for quotes from someone you know will be too expensive for you, because you see them publishing nothing but global campaigns or cover stories. Yes, I know, it would be nice to be able to trust a top-level professional and pay them little, but that’s usually not how it works.
Assuming you’ve gone for the solo professional, you’ll have to choose them based on the kind of images you’re going to retouch. Every retoucher who works alone usually has a range of images where they’re at their best, and their online portfolio shows it clearly. In Milan we say «Offelée, fa el tò mestée», which roughly translates to “pastry chef, mind your own trade,” meaning stick to what you know how to do and don’t meddle with the rest. This advice fits our craft perfectly too. If you’re good at retouching portraits, you’ll very rarely be good with automotive as well.
If you happened to have slightly more budget to dedicate to your project, you’ll realize right away that it’s worth relying on a studio that employs several people with different cultural backgrounds and inclinations, with a good manager who can route your project to the most suitable operator. The advantage of working this way is that you, as the client, have just one point of contact, who solves the problem for you while you get to focus on something else.
Once budget and type of product are settled, the usual clash is over timing. If you have a 120-image lookbook, you want it done well, and you want it in 5 hours, you’re dreaming, and the retoucher, on the other hand, is having a nightmare. A single operator can’t accurately retouch more than 25-35 images a day without making some mess, unless they skip a number of details, or limit themselves to a basic clean-up and a general copy. Or, unless they work 20 hours instead of the usual 8. In that case you, as the client, should expect a decline in the overall quality, you need to be aware of it and be fine with it in order to stay within your budget. In any case you can’t and shouldn’t blame the retouching if something goes wrong. Yes, I know, it’s a somewhat biased opinion, but what can you do, I’m a retoucher, and I know how it feels to be blamed for something that could and should have been figured out well before starting the job.
Over the years I’ve learned, with Digital Area, to weigh case by case whether to take a job, or to work out an agreement with clients and photographers. Three are the essential elements for a project to succeed: 1. time, 2. money, 3. quality. Picture them placed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle. Now picture yourself choosing two of them. The third will have to be a compromise. For example: you want quality and you have little time? Expect to spend more. You want quality but you have no budget? Expect to get the images later. You have time and you want quality? You can expect a lower price.
In conclusion, there’s no single recipe that works for everything, but simply applying the Ferrari rule and the “project triangle” will get you to choose the best one for you.
PS. This post was written by a human.
