Hello, fellow retouchers!

We are introducing a new format here on Edgeworld Retouch. LET’S TALK ABOUT RETOUCHING! is meant to be a podcast / video series in which we talk about all things retouching and post-production. Some will be interviews with other industry professionals, others will be me talking about questions I get asked often.

And by the way, I am Daniel your host on this show. Let me tell you a bit about myself, how I came to retouching and how this podcast came to be.

Let me start by saying: I am a professional retoucher. My main focus has become beauty images, portraits and advertising with cosmetics, hair, and all sorts of people related ads. This became as I am super drawn to faces and I simply love doing skin retouching.

But let me start way back, what was going on in my life and how I ended up with retouching.

I still remember, when I was a child I found everything technical interesting and tried to secretly take it apart without my parent’s knowledge of it. Later I built my first computer from other people’s broken computers. This was before Windows 95 still.

Fast forward a few years, while I was still in high school I started playing guitar in bands. I had the wish to learn to play the guitar since I was a little kid but my parents did not really support me so later in life I have sat down to learn it on my own, without taking classes. The music thing satisfied my desire for using gear and stuff but also was a creative outlet and a way to express myself.

By that time I also discovered Photoshop for the first time. I think it was CS2. One reason was, I was always eager to learn about all sorts of programs and what to do with them. The main driver, however, was the band. We needed show fliers, in the beginning, then a logo, later it was shirts designs and all that neat stuff. We had no money or anyone supporting it with that, so one of us was to take care of that or things were not happening. And that person was somehow always me.

I remember spending hours and hours, night after night trying to figure out how that worked and to eventually come up with something we could use. Today it makes me still laugh but at the time it was good enough for what it was. To give you a reference, I was just learning how to use layers and what pixel graphics are vs vector graphics. That stage or skill level I should keep for quite some time without making progress. My focus really was on that music thing I had going on and so I did what got the job done.

Later, when I had finished school it seemed logical to go more into the field of IT with all the experience I already had without formal education on it.

What I had studied was part IT and part electronics. It involved electronics hardware, computers, network and phone installations, audio electronics, data modulation and transmission, optical systems, printing, …

After the educational phase, I got stuck in the printing sector and was working hardware service, implementation and customer service in the B2B world. You can imagine, having to repair large format printers, copy machines, scanners of the biggest brands like Canon, Konica Minolta, Xerox, Kyocera,.. brings a lot of knowledge about the printing process. As many clients were graphic design firms or agencies I had insights on what their expectations are in terms of printing quality, the processes they are using, color management workflows, and calibration and profile creation.

Like with a lot of things in life, knowledge can accumulate and be used later in life for different purposes. But let’s get to that in a bit.

At some point, my creative outlet was gone. After band breakups and me finall