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Business & Clients

From Brief to Sign-Off, Speaking ‘Industry’

To anyone with years of working in commercial retouching the terminology comes naturally, but each of us remembers a time when the language of the industry wasn’t quite so clear. When speaking to an art director who might be interested in hiring you, it’s important to speak his or her language. Clear communication and understanding between you and your client instills trust, helps you deliver exactly what the client wants and gives your client the confidence that he hired the right talent. If you’re a skilled amateur looking to land your first commercial job, check out this quick guide to some common industry terminology and conduct your client correspondence with confidence.

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Beauty Retouching, Real World Practices

Improve Your Retouching By Learning From Make-Up Artists

At Retouching Academy we've recently started highlighting blogs, articles and opinion pieces from around the internet that we find compelling and have value for our professional and aspiring professional readers. In Five Ways To Improve Your Retouching (full of great tips, check...

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Real World Practices, Stay Inspired

What We Can Learn From Cinematography

In recent articles we've looked at some of the ways we can study the masters and learn techniques from other disciplines to improve as retouchers. From makeup artists to illustrators, there are a wealth of artistic fields outside of our own that...

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Business & Clients, Real World Practices

Optimize Your Photos For Facebook

Over the last decade or so photographers and retouchers have recognized the increasing need to engage with social media. It allows a businessperson to interact directly with a potentially huge number of global users and potential customers, so it’s...

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Hardware & Tools, Working With Colors

Why Your Monitor Can’t Display Some Colors

The modern PC monitor does an exceptional job of representing a photograph in light, built from hundreds of thousands, or millions of pixels, each capable of showing one of over 16 million colors. For those of you like myself who...

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Efficiency & Productivity, Real World Practices, Video Tutorial

Remove Dust, Lint and Debris Quickly

One of the secrets of retouching at a high level is that you can cheat. There are countless dirty little tricks you should completely avoid as a beginner, and that once you've achieved a professional competence might just save your...

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Commercial Retouching, Working With Colors

Working With Colors: Examining The Louis Vuitton Look

Following on from my last article in which we examined the use of complimentary colors in a Mario Testino campaign, this week I want to bring to your attention a piece in which I examined the very particular style...

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Beauty Retouching, Commercial Retouching, Industry & Community News

Natural Trends in Fashion Retouching

Retouching, as with photography and fashion itself, has always been a slave to trends, and the driving force behind what we as industry professionals produce for our clients has always been what the consumer wants to see. These are...

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High-End Beauty & Fashion, Video Tutorial

For Better Retouching Think Like an Art Director

As photographers and retouchers, we are used to scanning our images in search of the smallest blemishes and flyaway hairs to remove. However, there's a bigger picture to look at before you even get to that level of details. Try...

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Business & Clients, Commercial Retouching

How Much To Charge For Retouching. Part Two: Project Billing

In ‘How Much To Charge For Retouching Part One: Billing Hourly’ we took a look at hourly billing, the positives and negatives that it brings as a pricing model, and a rough idea of a typical hourly retoucher’s fee. In...

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Business & Clients, Commercial Retouching

How Much to Charge For Retouching. Part One: Billing Hourly

One of more frequent questions we’re asked at Retouching Academy is ‘how much should I be charging for retouching?’ Tutorials, articles, and advice on how to improve your retouching output are widely available, but the issue of pricing can...

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Commercial Retouching, High-End Beauty & Fashion

Retouching Controversy – How We Need To Move Forward

Advertising photography has always presented the viewer with a fantasy, a flawless, idealised framing of a product as it might appear at its most desirable, carefully posed and painstakingly lit. To some this is art, to others a willful,...

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Business & Clients, Commercial Retouching

Types of Retouching Careers

If you’re seriously considering a future career in retouching, you’re undoubtedly aware of the huge range of potential options and specializations in the industry. From working fashion in-house, to remotely delivering an architectural interiors project, or assisting at a...

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Hardware & Tools, Real World Practices

So Do You Really Need A Wacom Tablet For Retouching?

One of the frequent questions asked by beginner retouchers, and both photographers and retouchers looking to improve their workflow is 'do I need a graphics tablet for retouching?' First let's look at the mouse. The computer mouse was invented over...

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Business & Clients, Successful Retouching Business

To Work Or Not To Work… For Free

In the creative industries right now, there's been a surface of a long building outcry against the expectation from some quarters that we as professionals work for free, for the promise of future work, or for that old classic...

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