[6-02] "Standard retouching"

After a while, retouching began to make sense.

I look back and much was amateur; the client would have been better off if they used the original.

I have determined how to get around it:

(1) Offer the original (SOOC) immediately after they choose it for editing. (Reasoning—if they dislike the editing, the original can always be used, and there's no risk of offense because they do not have to ask for the original.)

(2) The retouching is actually better.

So it is: the basics of retouching. Nothing extreme + unambiguously good changes. The golden rule is that changing an image has to be make it better. This is actually a principle that carries well in many contexts: valuable artists and craftspeople want to improve their techniques, and after hard work they keep the results given the labor involved. When, in fact, such changes might not be worth keeping – the new orange milk tart introduced by the pastry chef is actually not as pleasing as s/he felt.

This wordy explanation could explain why many business do not improve services; they felt what took so long to master should not be improved; it is an emotion that I have felt after editing an image.

I now constantly check changes, switching on and off layers. This is the magic of Photoshop: I can see within milliseconds each changes I am introducing. This is like an optometrist changing lenses to check vision. Sometimes the differences are obvious; sometimes they are barely perceptible.