Photography Class Notes - Common Misconception of Post Productions

Hello everyone! Today, I like to clarify common misconceptions of the term "editing" and "retouching".

The other day, my friend Chris Bahn at Put That Back asked me if I retouch with Photoshop? I said, "Always". Then he responded with "That would take a long time." It got me thinking, what did he meant? When I pressed retouch all of his event pictures.

That's when the I connected to the what he was saying what he actually meant.

"Oh! You meant editing, not retouching! Yeah, I don't use Photoshop for that. I use Lightroom, or Bridge."

So what's the difference you asked?



The difference is that editing is to make selections for photography. And retouching is the actual process of fixing imperfections an individual image. This is the way most photographers understand it in the creative field.

Editing is a term commonly by photographers when culling images, or "editing down", from a large set of photographs taken that same day or event. Typically they happens in rounds and happens very fast, because photographers are looking for one or two particular things each round to cull down. Arriving to a set of hero image that tells the story of the day.

The term Retouching opens those hero images with Photoshop and fix any imperfections you'll find to the image. That could be skin imperfections, lighting issues, even compositing multiple parts of different images into one image.

These are the common misconceptions when I run into whenever talk about post productions. It's sometimes a company cultural thing, where it takes a bit of time to correct. But if you're reading this then I'm hoping this helped correct that for you.

I highly recommend Adobe Lightroom when it comes to editing.

Thanks for reading. This is Charlie signing out.