Is it really that easy to photoshop?

You can just photoshop that, right?

How many of you think photoshop is some magic button you press, and VIOLA! 10 pounds falls off, and your beautiful face is now blemish free?

Raise your hands, because I was right there with you. Before I was a photographer, I totally thought “photoshopping” something, was as simple as the press of a button.

I see photographers talking all the time about clients coming back with extensive photoshopping requests, saying something along the lines of “Can’t you just photoshop it?”. Maybe the client wants their nose to look small smaller, wants a car removed from the background, or wants 10 pound gone. Whatever you can think of, it’s probably been requested to be photoshopped. There is a lot of frustration around this subject, but I think it can all be addressed with some education.

Photoshop, really, is it’s own art form.

Depending on the task, “photoshopping” an image is usually a tedious, and time consuming project, involving a lot of detail work. If you don’t believe me, get on youtube and look up a few tutorials. They will seriously make your head spin.

Personally, I promise my clients a range between 50 – 100 edited images per hour of photography. Usually, that’s a low estimate. Many times, I have over 100 images to give back for an engagement session that lasts an hour.

When I say the images are edited, I mean that they are color corrected. That is, I’ve gone through, and made sure the colors look like what you’ve seen of my work on my website. I don’t do extensive retouching for a few reasons.

1. I wouldn’t be able to give back the variety that I do now.
I would have to narrow down my image selection from over 100 images, to closer to 20 per hour.

2. It would make my turn around times exponentially longer.
As it stands, I’ve returned most of my 2016 wedding galleries to my clients in about a week. It would take me months if I was extensively retouching each image.

3. My shooting style bright, which naturally hides some skin imperfections.
Rarely will you see something on my site that has been altered in Photoshop.

4. I don’t want perfection, I want real.
I want you to be confident in where you are. Now, I have talked about this more than a few times, like here, but I mean it. I think that my clients are beautiful. I want to show them their true beauty just how they are.

Okay, now that we have established that extensive retouching on all of your images would mean significantly less images, and an extensive turn around time, let’s talk about what it looks like if there is something that needs to be fixed.

Because photoshop is it’s own art form, some fixes might be beyond your photographers’ skill set, or require more time than they can spend on one image. If I have a client who is really needing something fixed, I jokingly explain to them that I send it to my “photoshop wizards”. Really, it’s an outsourcing company, that specializes in extensive photoshopping. I just ask that they cover the cost that the outsourcing company charges.

The more you know! 🙂