

The Importance of Professional Retouching in Product Photography
Oct 2, 2024
2 min read
0
2
0
It's nearly impossible to find a published professional photo that hasn't been retouched. While retouching is often associated with beauty and portrait photography, it plays a crucial role in product photography as well, though it focuses on different aspects. So, what exactly does product photography retouching involve?

Product photography deals with unique challenges—textures, lighting, magnification, and external factors—that differ significantly from portrait photography. While a model’s main concern might be smooth skin, the checklist for product photography typically includes the following:
1) Clean-up: The most fundamental aspect of retouching is ensuring that the product looks pristine—dust-free, fingerprint-free, with no uneven surfaces or stray particles. In product photography, especially when using macro lenses, tiny details invisible to the naked eye become glaringly obvious and must be corrected in post-production. With multiple shots and angles, this cleaning process can become quite time-consuming.
2) Removing "Helping Hands" and supports: In product photography, flexible arms with clamps—often called “helping hands”—are frequently used to hold elements of the scene, props, or the product itself in specific positions or at certain angles. Fishing lines, thin wires, or translucent tubes may also be used to create floating effects or precise setups. Of course, all of these supports need to be carefully removed during retouching to give the illusion that the product is naturally suspended or perfectly positioned.
3) Visual Enhancements: To make a product stand out, retouching is used to intensify colors, highlight important details, and create focus through lighting and contrast adjustments. This step may involve color grading to achieve a specific mood, applying special presets (collections of adjustments applied simultaneously), correcting lens distortions, reducing chromatic aberration, and fine-tuning the depth of field. While each image may require different tweaks, these enhancements lead to vast improvements over the raw photo.
4) 3D/VFX Additions: One of the less obvious, but increasingly common, aspects of product photography retouching is the use of 3D and visual effects (VFX). Particles, product multiplication, or complex animations can be created digitally, complementing or replacing time-consuming, one-shot-only setups with powders, liquids, or fast strobes. 3D software is now extremely advanced and can replicate virtually any effect, making it a valuable tool for achieving creative visions that might be difficult or risky to capture in-camera.
Taking the photo is only the first step; it’s in the retouching process that the image truly comes to life. This step is what distinguishes a random snapshot from a professional photograph, polished and ready for high-level advertising.