There’s quite a few techniques I’ve seen photographers use to speed up skin retouching. I’ve played with all of them and can instantly spot the shitty, sorry “budget friendly” edits even when they’re super small on mobile social feeds.
Without getting too far into the weeds about how these quick edits are done, these techniques basically rely on blurring skin texture and or color tones so imperfections are “smoothed out.” All you really need to know if you’re not interested in the details is that this method looks super fake-o-rific when you zoom in or blow the image up to anything larger than the size of your phone.
These methods can look good enough to the untrained eye scrolling a social feed and can be done very quickly at a much lower cost. You can see exactly how these quick skin softening edits are done here if you’d like to know the details about how this is done.
With the popularity of social media and the desire to keep up with the demands of the algorithm even the once great magazine publications, who’s quality was once the gold standard everyone looked up to, allows photos with these sub par skin edits on their feeds.
Instead of creating (or curating) only the highest quality images like they used to, they now sacrifice quality editing so they can post stuff that looks good enough for a mobile feed 1-3 times a day.
As it turns out most boudoir photographers are following suit for similar reasons. To cheaply market themselves, photographers choose to do 5-10 minute quick edits using these quick skin smoothing tactics so they can continue to post regularly and feed their social algorithms yummy, yummy newness.
This desire for more eyeballs further incentivizes budget photographers to lower the quality of their edits or outsource their retouching like we mentioned earlier. These quick edits allow them to generate continuous streams of new content faster and cheaper at the expense of quality.
In contrast to the 10 minute edit, every image I present to my clients get’s as much attention as I think it needs to look it’s best. Using more refined techniques, the time I invest in editing vary’s greatly based on many factors. On average I’d estimate I spend about and hour per edit on most of my clients images.
Most people honestly probably can’t tell the difference between high quality edits and super quick ones when scrolling their Instagram feeds. This is mostly due to the physical size of the device they’re viewing them on. That said, if you were to look at final albums side by side of higher and lesser quality artists, I have no doubt that everyone reading this would notice the quality difference instantly.
TL;DR:
High quality editing is fundamental to creating timeless images you’ll still love decades from now. That said if you’re just looking for someone to create quick images to send to your significant other’s phone or something like that, this might be a good place for you to compromise if you want to save a buck.
#Cheap #Boudoir #Photographers
