The Difference Between Photo Retouching and Manipulation

The National Encyclopedia describes retouching as an act in which small changes are made to beautification images. To facilitate the language of this article, I have delimited the word retouching. This is about image manipulation. Light and color corrections are also a form of retouching, but it is a subject in itself.

When you retouch a photograph, you change reality. Some would probably call it a distortion. It would help if you, therefore, thought twice before doing so. Why do you retouch? What are the purpose and goal? What side effects can occur? Are you fooling someone into achieving your goals?

Of course, there may be legitimate reasons for retouching. I do not usually bother to fix my private photos to turn a useless photograph into worth framing.

 

Retouch away

A common form of retouching is that you simplify your photography to highlight the subject. You remove disturbing backgrounds, such as power lines that run right through the landscape or the classic flagpole that seems to grow through the head of your subject.

 

The purpose is not to change the photo but to highlight what is the subject.

A photo with removed elements.

Sunset in Venice. The object in the foreground could probably not be avoided, and the construction cranes in the city as well. Easily removed in Photoshop. Now there is more focus on the silhouette of the city and the sunset.

Here, With could have retained the background, but by retouching more grass, the child emerges and is allowed to dominate the motif undisturbed. Such changes can be considered simple in a private photo album and are very common in marketing, where the photo must be perfect.

Combine several successful shots in one montage

When you are under pressure in a photo situation, getting that perfect picture can be difficult. When the body is perfect, the head looks in the wrong direction or vice versa.

Afterward, you can use Photoshop to create a montage of different shots. This is a common way to solve problems. The alternative would have been to try again and pay a new model fee.

Which photo is fake?

By placing the eyes from one photograph on top of another, the montage is fixed. In order not to become clear, they both merge with a smooth transition. The light is corrected on the new pair of eyes to match the first face.

Assembly of two pictures.

For example, it can be not easy to take a picture where two people manage to jump exactly simultaneously. If you instead have two pictures taken at about the same time and with the same sunlight, it is easy to put them together so that it looks like a successful jump in retrospect.

Ethical issues around the assembly

In the spring of 2003, the LA Times used a photograph created by two very good photos. But to get that extra eye-catching photo, they were both put together. This was discovered when someone managed to find a repetition, and there was a lot of commotion around it.

Read about the fake photo in the LA Times on Poynter Online.

Mounted in LA times.

Beauty retouching

Beauty retouching is the form of retouching you usually read about; “The breasts have been made bigger! The wrinkles are removed!”. Today, this is done to a large extent in all industries, except news photography. It can be a costly process. Removing a pair of pimples may be done in a quarter of an hour, but “fixing” someone’s butt can take much longer.

A little touch-up.

There are few, if any, limits to what you can do if you only have a good original, plenty of time, and no moral barriers. In the picture above, you can see an example of removed pimples.

I prefer a little touch. The still image allows people to study me in detail in a way that can feel uncomfortable.

This is how Kevin Ame’s author of the book “Photoshop: The Art of Photographing Women” writes:

“A photographer steals a fraction of a second of a model’s life and freezes it forever in high resolution, for anyone to examine and for as long as they want and as close as they want. In life, people move. Rarely are we closer than half a meter from them. Each meeting is for a limited time. To retouch and improve a still image is to try to make this frozen image of reality as vivid as possible.”

Some like to take in extra hard. The plasticity, which appears when every millimeter in the photo is leveled, is sometimes desirable in the fashion industry.