Sometimes people wonder why I spend so much time retouching the photos. “They are already nice,” they say. Why waste time on such details? I spent an hour or more with each photo to make it amazing. It also reflects in my price list. This is one of the things that make a difference between a nice photo that you post on social media and then forget about it and an amazing photo that you can’t stop looking at and eventually print in large to place in your dining room.

With adults, it’s usually removing unflattering shadows, softening deeper wrinkles and smoothing skin colours, shaping whatever is an odd shape, and bringing light to faces...

With children it’s different, there are different challenges.  Here is an example. We made a couple of photos like this, each with a different expression. This particular photo was the one that the clients chose for me to finalise. I would have chosen the same one - it looks pretty dreamy and the wind moved the hair in a nice way. The wind unfortunately also moved a strand of hair just over the boy’s eye. And the photo was in portrait mode, also the crop was a bit too tight. I knew I had to deal with these problems to be happy with the result. 

The second problem (crop) was easy to fix. I took another photo from the same series that was shot in landscape mode, placed the selected photo on top and blended it in.

The first problem (hair in the eye) was a challenge, it took me an hour of retouching just to remove the hair from the face. It was very fiddly work, with lots of cloning, coping, healing, and adjusting brightness, hue and saturation. Huge amount of tiny steps. 

And of course, after all this, softening shadows in a face, healing some scratches and bruises, smoothing colours and contrast.

Here is a short video from my Instagram showing some of the steps. Each step is a recording of many brush strokes that I had done - that’s why it’s so short, just a minute and half instead of the hour and half that I spent with the picture in reality.

Some people ask me if it’s necessary. Other photographers don’t spend such a long time with it, they charge less and make more. Yep, others don’t. I do. It’s the details, that make the photo. A huge amount of small details. I could do just some simple improvements, many of them automatic and it would make an OK result. But ‘OK’ is not good enough for me. I don’t enjoy making ‘OK’ photos. I enjoy making amazing photos. I want to make photos that people can’t resist and print out to look at them every single day to make them feel blessed and happy.