LET'S TALK RETOUCHING!

Issues I found with people trying to reach out to create business opportunities:

Places where you can find possible clients:

Issues I found with people trying to reach out to create business opportunities:

Places where you can find possible clients:

I'm an image creator and storyteller at heart, no matter what the discipline. My work varies from photography, photo manipulation and illustration to ceramics, sculpture and painting. I draw inspiration from various sources, such as books, movies, sculptures, music, mythology, fantasy, history, people, nature and whatever else I find on my path.

Creative mastermind Roderique is joining us today, discussing whether image manipulation shall be equally included to the term of retouching. Or if compositing artwork and beauty retouching are two completely different beasts to master.

Roderique can draw from a variety of educations and has working experience in fields like 3D, special effects for sills and motion pictures, graphics and design, and of course photography and retouching.

Roderique who also goes by the artist’s name of DRACORUBIO found his way into the creative industry by drawing. As a child, drawing was his passion and his parent’s house is still stuffed with books full of his early artistry steps. Being a child of the 80’s he was heavily influenced by the time’s comics as well. Later on he went on studying at the arts academy in the Netherlands  ending with a bachelor of arts degree in 3D and visual effects.

By the time computer technology was just rising and Roderique found his ideas hardly could be resembled like he imagined them to be. So he found himself in a situation lacking the tools needed to create his own art whilst commercially working in the motion graphics industry.

Nico Socha started working with Photoshop in the early 90s. Yet, his passion for retouching got fueled later in his life when he decided to be a full-time photographer back in 2013. With his deep understanding of technical and aesthetical components, he is now able to deliver high-quality post-production. Today Nico is owning and running a photo & post production agency with 2 employees in Germany.

Today we have another pen warrior on the show. Nico Socha is joining us and talks shop about retouching, how it is to grow from freelance to owning a retouching studio.

Nico is coming from a Design background and started early on doing websites for small clients and later on, he transitioned via advertising agency work into image creation and retouching.  Photoshop was always part of the process and Nico knows the application for years. As many people, he had discovered in the 90’s more by accident when his dad bought a scanner and the software that came with it was a very early version of Photoshop. He was hooked from the start.

There is no day during the week on which I do not open Photoshop

Now being a retoucher, Nico’s focus clearly is beauty and fashion images. He does other advertising works like cars but his passion is people and faces. While working on images he can draw from his background in the design world and have experience with 3D and video. Working with and on people also is sort of balancing many hours in front of the computer with not much social interaction. Therefore he prefers to also do photography from time to time where he can get out of the studio and directly communicate with clients and partners during a job.

Nico usually starts with Lightroom or capture one and exports his processed files or opens them up from Lightroom straight into Photoshop. Then he does all his retouching and if working with Lightroom he saves it back into Lightroom to export the finals from there.

He generally prefers to work with tiff files over PSD files. The main advantage is having a maximum file size of 4GB whereas you will be stuck at a maximum file size of 2GB

Recently we met with Gerry Kingsley to have a conversation on retouching, education, branding, and some other topics. If you have missed his introduction and the first part of our conversation, please, check out Let’s Talk Retouching Part #1.

We are going to continue our discussion with Gerry today. Our main topics are: business models, branding, different fields of retouching, client expectations,…



There are different fields of retouching: Editorial, Corporate, Advertising, CGI + 2D, …

Many of them require different skill sets and with different clients come different expectations. The challenge is to stick out and to also manage your workflows, your skills suitable for your client’s needs. This is important to be valued by your clients and to work efficiently and professionally, but also to make enough money to stay in business.

A hard lesson to learn is not to take any job. Of course, we all want to make money! But what often happens is, when you are trying to cover a lot of different styles and fields within the industry, you often end up “mediocre” or better, not specialized. It is impossible to specialize in everything.

Specializing and refining the craft you enjoying will pay off in the long run and clients will eventually come to you for your specialization. The expert will always be more valued than a generalist.

However, be patient. Building a business takes time, don’t expect to reach the top in no time. It will take dedication, refinement of your skills and constant education to eventually become a profitable business.

As we mentioned before, it pays off to become an expert in the field you love working in. But how will you accomplish this goal?

One of the best tips to grow your business is to invest time into making connections with possible clients. You have to see this as an investment, even though it is hard. It might come in the form of working for free or for exposure, however, you have to see it as building reports with people who might eventually hire you for a job. If you get your foot in the door and people like your work and how you communicate, they will come back to working with you again.

That does not necessarily mean you have to work for free, always. I am not trying to say yet. You should never undervalue or undercut yourself. But working for someone can also be as valuable as spending money on advertising. Instead of money, you invest your time and skills.

With different fields of photography and retouching the client expectations are different and so should your approach to working on such images.

Mor

Gerry Kingsley is a Canadian commercial and contemporary portrait photographer. His clients range from artists, authors, politicians, actors, models, and other public figures.

His style can best be described as in editorial portraiture with a cinematic look. Gerry prefers to tell a story with one and every image he takes

Gerry co-runs Studio Nine Eight in Sudbury, does write for Retouching Academy and teaches photography at Thorneloe University.

His portfolio perfectly demonstrates his editorial style and cinematic look: please, have a look at Gerry’s work!

The first topic I have been discussing with Gerry was if a retoucher needs his or her own style in order to get work or to be taken seriously in the industry.

Gerry is convinced it is a two-part thing. For once it surely is advantageous to have a style. However, some photographers might not have their own style and therefore demand a retoucher’s creative input to create a visual style for the job. When it comes to hiring a retoucher he thinks it definitely helps to stand out from competitors but he would also want to know if a retoucher can take his work to another level, add creative input, and still work cohesively within the style he has himself.

In my personal opinion, we need to be flexible with our style to satisfy our client’s needs. This often means to not apply our own style and taste but to work with them and to also adjust to their style and taste.

We can both agree your skills and craft has to be top level to keep up with the industry. Just being a one trick pony might get you a food into the door but won’t help you for very long.

You Have To Be Good For Yourself!

We both could agree on just being a retoucher is not good enough. You need to understand photography, lighting and the creative process of advertising.

Your portfolio represents your passion. It is your asset and demonstrates the type of work you want to get booked for and therefore should be cohesive and demonstrate your skills and creativity.

Working commercially means to work as a team. However, as a retoucher, you are not always super involved. It will help you a lot to understand the processes going on in the commercial world, struggles on set, and your client’s needs in terms of key factors to sell their ideas and products.

You also have to be willing to invest in making a connection with the other team members even if they are not the paying client. It will benefit the overall outcome. The information you can gain from other team members can be extremely important throughout the process.

I want to introduce a new format to this show. To begin with this episode, Kai, please give us a very quick overview of who you are, what you do and then we will dive deeper into all the good and interesting things later on.

My name is Kai Gut, I'm a retoucher for beauty based in the very south of Germany.

Kai got into retouching quite some time ago. His ambitions came after realizing he was not doing much with his life. He wanted to change but did not yet know what this thing might be. Starting with videography and YouTube he got involved in the creative field. Later got interested in photography too yet realized his photography was not on the level he wanted it to be. However, his love for Photoshop was fueled and he was getting much better at it than with photography.

From there on Kai focused on mainly retouching and was getting better and better. Focussing on only retouching and putting all his efforts into becoming better in the craft allowed him to take on clients and retouch for photographers and magazines.

Kai mainly enjoys detailed work. Therefore his focus has become people. Mainly working on beauty images and fashion. He prefers close up skin work over anything else.

As a man, it might rare to be into makeup but Kai loves it and he is super interested in the application in makeup and the current trends. This surely helps him in retouching images in the field of beauty.

© Marina Murasheva

I want to introduce a new format to this show. To begin with this episode, Kai, please give us a very quick overview of who you are, what you do and then we will dive deeper into all the good and interesting things later on.

Kai got into retouching quite some time ago. His ambitions came after realizing he was not doing much with his life. He wanted to change but did not yet know what this thing might be. Starting with videography and YouTube he got involved in the creative field. Later got interested in photography too yet realized his photography was not on the level he wanted it to be. However, his love for Photoshop was fueled and he was getting much better at it than with photography.

From there on Kai focused on mainly retouching and was getting better and better. Focussing on only retouching and putting all his efforts into becoming better in the craft allowed him to take on clients and retouch for photographers and magazines.

Kai mainly enjoys detailed work. Therefore his focus has become people. Mainly working on beauty images and fashion. He prefers close up skin work over anything else.

As a man, it might rare to be into makeup but Kai loves it and he is super interested in the application in makeup and the current trends. This surely helps him in retouching images in the field of beauty.

Kai usually starts with capture one and exports his processed files without any sharpening applied.

He only does sharpening after exporting different variants for his clients. He also adjusts the images color profiles in export depending on his client’s needs.

The best tip he can give to others and what has helped him grow the most is learning to zoom out.

He does explain this in more detail in our podcast!

Now that some time has passed I am thinking about how our April fools prank was perceived and I want to talk about the idea behind it and why we have decided to do it the way we did.

Before getting into the why let me tell you what we have done.

Just two days before April 1st, 2018 I started giving sneak peeks via social media that a new tutorial would be coming out on April 1st. Even though we always have been heavily invested in education there are not many tutorials done by us. There are a few YouTube videos but not in a format that would be sold as a full-featured retouching tutorial.

One reason for the lack of tutorials done is our focus on work. Putting in the time to create educational content is not easy and we have to be running a business here and our main business simply is digital post-production. Therefore, educational content often comes short.

Of course, we also published a course trailer on YouTube to make people aware of this amazing tutorial.

The video promises to learn about a new and unique technique developed by us and releasing it to the public for the first time as the technique formerly has been unknown to anyone else. Of course, this is a life-changing technique and a must-know.

We all want to get better, work faster, and make more money. So if this technique can make you a retouching god, you might want to learn about it, right?

The Course can be “purchased” on our website and is currently sold at a sales price of $0 USD. This is obviously a great opportunity to get some new educational content.

But wait, some might have been looking suspiciously at this tutorial. It was released April 1st?! But then, they did not have to pay for it either. The download package contains everything as promised. The video course and a Photoshop action with some help layers we included. Soooo, all good. No fluke and why putting in all the effort in producing the trailer, the tutorial, and making it available.

Here you can still download our fake tutorial!

So why would we announce a tutorial with such short-term notice?

And why would we give it away for free?!?

Well, we wanted to prove a point here.

And what was actually wrong with the tutorial?!?!?

Well, as all promise sounded to be too good to be true, it was. The tutorial was a complete fluke. While we used video editing techniques to make it look like it worked, in reality, all was fake and would never ever work as shown.

We have used our action of visible aid layers to create some changes in the image that were later swapped for a final image which then was displayed as the result of this magical new technique.

Some people at that point took notice of them being fooled, others have not. Which we have expected. In our purchase confirmation, everyone already got an info saying the tutorial was an April’s fool prank but we also expected most people not to read it.

Unfortunately, some people invested quite some time in trying out the technique without it working out and we are sorry for that.

First, it was April 1st and we wanted to pull off a prank. Being us we tend to do things a bit different here at Edgeworld Retouch than most other people. So it had to be a bit over the top.

Part of it was making it look real. With the announcement, the trailer video on YouTube and then an actual video tutorial with some extras delivered in the download package we have made it look as real as possible.

I know we have pulled some tric

Nico Socha started as freelance retoucher and has since grown his business to having a studio, producing photography and offering post-production services to advertising agencies and companies.

Today we have another pen warrior on the show. Nico Socha is joining us and talks shop about retouching, how it is to grow from freelance to owning a retouching studio.

Nico is coming from a Design background and started early on doing websites for small clients and later on, he transitioned via advertising agency work into image creation and retouching.  Photoshop was always part of the process and Nico knows the application for years. As many people, he had discovered in the 90’s more by accident when his dad bought a scanner and the software that came with it was a very early version of Photoshop. He was hooked from the start.

There is no day during the week on which I do not open Photoshop

Now being a retoucher, Nico’s focus clearly is beauty and fashion images. He does other advertising works like cars but his passion is people and faces. While working on images he can draw from his background in the design world and have experience with 3D and video. Working with and on people also is sort of balancin