Everything I stopped retouching
A list of the edits I used to make by default, and why almost all of them came off the list.
For about two years I had a retouching pass that ran on every frame before I looked at it properly. Skin smoothed a little. Blemishes gone. A bin taken out of a corner. Straightened. It was fast, it was invisible, and it was quietly turning every photograph into the same photograph.
What came off the list
- Skin work of any kind. It was the first to go and the easiest to stop missing.
- Removing objects. If a bin is in the frame, the bin was there.
- Sky replacement. Never seriously used it, but it needed saying.
- Straightening by default. Some horizons are meant to lean.
- Cloning out cables. Cables are half of what a street looks like.
What stayed
Grading stayed, and got heavier. Black point, contrast, the occasional heavy crop. Dust spotting stayed — a sensor mark is my failure, not the scene’s. Converting to black and white stayed, though I do it less than I used to.
The difference between grading and fixing is whether you are changing the photograph or changing what happened.
That line is doing a lot of work and it is not always clean. A heavy crop changes what happened. So does a two-stop lift. I have not resolved it and I am not sure it resolves.
What it cost
The hit rate dropped. When a frame can no longer be rescued in the edit, a lot of frames stop being usable. My keeper rate per roll went from around six to around two.
The two are better than the six were.