Recorded: Welcome to The ReWork with Allison Tyler Jones, a podcast dedicated to inspiring portrait photographers to uniquely brand, profitably price, and confidently sell their best work. Allison has been doing just that for the last 15 years, and she’s proven that it’s possible to create unforgettable art and run a portrait business that supports your family and your dreams. All it takes is a little rework. Episodes will include interviews with experts from in and outside of the photo industry, mini-workshops, and behind-the-scenes secrets that Allison uses in her portrait studio every single day. She will challenge your thinking and inspire your confidence to create a profitable, sustainable portrait business you love through continually refining and reworking your business. Let’s do the rework.
Allison Tyler Jones: Hi friends, and welcome back to The ReWork. Today’s episode is all things retouching with the best retoucher in the world, I think, Mrs. Stacey Hemeyer, who is our Allison Tyler Jones Photography associate photographer and expert retoucher. And we are going to talk about managing client expectations around retouching, what to say and how to say it when somebody thinks that you can do the impossible in Photoshop or how to handle when they don’t even realize what’s possible in Photoshop. I think you’re going to find a lot of good tips in this episode about how to manage your client’s expectations around retouching, getting their permission before you do something maybe that you shouldn’t, and then a couple of stories about some retouching gone horribly wrong and actually really, really right. So let’s do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, it’s been a while, but I am so excited to have Stacey Hemeyer, who is our lovely associate photographer and retoucher extraordinaire and all things amazing Photoshop here with us today. Thanks for being here, Stacey.
Stacey Hemeyer: Yeah, thanks for having me again.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, so we are going to get into the nitty-gritty of retouching, which might seem weird because this is not a YouTube video. There’s no visual, there’s no video, and we are going to talk about retouching and kind of what that means in the ATJ photo world and how we do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: So what I’d like to talk about is let’s start with how we manage client expectations regarding retouching, okay so, but this is before it ever gets to you. I’m usually doing the, Chelsea’s doing the first contact on the phone call. I’m doing the consultation, and so usually you’re not coming into the retouching obviously until it’s been captured, but sometimes clients will have questions about that ahead of time. So what are some of the things that, and then when you had your business before, what are some of the things that clients are asking about are possible in Photoshop and that sort of thing?
Stacey Hemeyer: Well, the first thing we usually tell people is we want it to look like you. We don’t want you to look plastic, we don’t want you to look super airbrushed. We want it to look like you, but with a really good night’s sleep and 10 pounds thinner.
Allison Tyler Jones: Exactly.
Stacey Hemeyer: So we’re just making you look the best you can look.
Allison Tyler Jones: The best version of you at this time in your life.
Stacey Hemeyer: Exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: If you’re 60, we don’t want you to look 20.
Stacey Hemeyer: Exactly. And I know, especially with women, a lot of women want the backs of their hands retouched, which I think is fine until you get to a certain age, and then we want to see those age spots and the veins.
Allison Tyler Jones: Do we? Do we really want to, now that I’m at the age where I’m starting to see that, I’m like, at what point do you want to see it?
Stacey Hemeyer: Yeah, I’m just thinking of my mom. One of the things I love about her is her hands and her hands now have age spots, and she’s got a little arthritis in her pinky, so her pinky has a little bend in it.
Allison Tyler Jones: It’s a little crooked, yeah.
Stacey Hemeyer: That’s part of what I want to see in her image. So it kind of depends on who’s buying it too. If I’m buying it for my mom, or if I’m buying it of my mom, I want to see that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Stacey Hemeyer: If my mom’s buying it, she probably does want it a little more brushed.
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, and so that is a really good point because, we have a client that I just love so much, and she said to me, she is absolutely drop dead gorgeous, by the way, okay? She’s a pharmacist, totally gorgeous, but she just doesn’t want to see any aging. And so she said to me, I want to be unrecognizable. When our holiday cards go out, I want my friends to think that my husband has remarried somebody younger. I absolutely want, I don’t want there to be one wrinkle, one, so what do you do with that? Like, yes.
Stacey Hemeyer: Well, with her, I mean, she was beautiful, so it really wasn’t doing much. But you and I have, from back before I worked with you, a joint client who you may know who I’m talking about, who is a little older. She’s older than either of by probably 15 years and starting to look it, but she constantly wants to look 25 and she is not. So I think sometimes it is hard. On a portrait that would come out of our studio, we’re not going to retouch her to the point of being unrecognizable, but we are going to smooth fine lines and maybe take out some of those neck wrinkles and soften the crow’s feet and that kind of thing.
Stacey Hemeyer: And it is, honestly, I think of the retouching as art, and I’m looking at every single image differently. I’m looking at how they look, what they want, what they’re wearing, who’s buying it, because it’s going to be different, and I want it to be unique to that family. I want them to feel so good when they look at it. I’ve joked with some of our clients, I’m like, it’s really good to have your retoucher be a plus-sized woman ’cause I know what you want to look like.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, right. Right, for sure. And I think, one thing that you’re saying that’s making me think too is I think it’s also, it’s so much a part of the art, meaning everybody’s going to have a different philosophy. So each photographer, like if a photographer is primarily photographing women over 40 and they’re doing the Sue Bryce model or whatever, they’re definitely going to have a way of retouching that is specific to what they’re doing. And so with us, we’re photographing maybe an entire family, so we might have a grandma, a mom, a grandchild, we might have four generations, and so then, what is your philosophy? And that’s part of the expertise when you’re talking to your clients about, when I’m in a sales appointment, the clients are asking, okay, well what are you retouching out of this? Are you going to get that zit? Are you going to get, they want to know what you’re doing. And so we actually have our own philosophy about things like with young kids, little kids, I usually don’t want to retouch out the bruises on their or the scuffs on their knees.
Stacey Hemeyer: ‘Cause it’s kind of what makes them kids.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right, but that’s in a portrait where they’re running around, they’re being crazy, but in a very formal, absolutely gorgeous, that’s going in a gilded frame that’s dramatically lit and they’re in a beautiful gown or velvet dress or something like that. In that case, you would probably retouch it out. So it’s just having a thought about, like you don’t always do it one way.
Stacey Hemeyer: Well, and I think it depends too on the photographer and the style. Our style, we do tend to leave those things in more than others. Like I’m thinking of that portrait that used to hang in the front entry of our studio. And the boy’s in a tux and the girl is in a ballgown, and she’s got her mom’s Louis Vuitton’s, dramatically lit, so it’s the gilded frame that you’re talking about, but she has a bandaid on her finger, and we left that on because that’s the ATJ touch. That’s part of what makes it our brand. And so you have to keep that in mind when you’re retouching also. What do you want your brand to be? What do you want people to notice about your work?
Allison Tyler Jones: Okay, I love that. And so, things to consider. Also, let’s talk about unreasonable requests, because I think this Photoshop conversation falls into two categories. Like you’re shooting, let’s say that you’re in a shoot and some egregious thing is happening, and they’re like, oh, don’t worry, they can retouch that out. It’s like, okay, slow your roll. Don’t quit your day job because you know what we can retouch out or what we can’t retouch out. Somebody that said, okay, we want to shoot this whole session on gray. And then we finish it and we’re walking out and they’re like, now, if we don’t like the gray, can you just make all the backgrounds white?
Allison Tyler Jones: And you’re like, do we need to turn around and go back in there? Because no. So there’s managing that kind of expectation. So there are, the clients that think anything can happen, oh, my favorite was, okay, we want to have our whole family photographed, and then our daughter that lives in Australia, we want her to have you Photoshop her in. And I said, okay, that’s great. Of course we can do that. When will she be coming in to be photographed? Oh no, she’ll just send you a picture off her phone and you can just put it in the picture off her cell phone.
Stacey Hemeyer: No.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, that’s probably not going to happen.
Stacey Hemeyer: Anyone who does retouching realizes that pixels are not pixels. You know what I mean? What you get out of a cell phone is very different from what we get out of our high resolution cameras and blending those two.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, this is to the photographic audience, so we don’t need to sport with their intelligence, they know, everybody laughed at that, right? So there’s the people that think we can do everything magically that we’re, Photoshop Santa Claus. And then there are people that, when I’m doing a sales appointment with a client, the images have not been retouched. So they are looking at unretouched images. And so sometimes they’ll say, oh, well, I really like that, but I don’t like that wrinkle on my face, or I don’t like my neck or whatever. They don’t realize what we can do. So some people think we can do too much and some people think we can’t do enough. So say more about that.
Stacey Hemeyer: Well, so, on doing more than we can do, I was shooting a wedding 15 years ago, and I was doing a big family shot, and there were probably 20, 25 people in it, and one of the guys on the back row was holding a baby, and the baby was screaming like bloody murder. And so he put the baby on the floor and yells to me, you can just Photoshop her in at the end. And I’m like, I can’t create a baby.
Allison Tyler Jones: I can’t create a happy smiley baby.
Stacey Hemeyer: Well, with AI now I probably could.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, you probably could. That’s true.
Stacey Hemeyer: Back then you could not create a baby. I have to have a baby that I can swap a face or swap a body or whatever. You can’t put the baby on the floor where I can’t see it ’cause you’re on the third row and expect me to create a baby. So that’s thinking I can do everything when I really can’t. But then we also have clients who will say, when we’re showing the work to hit the view and order appointment, there’s still the lights in the background, because as we all know, the closer the light is, the better it is. And so it’s often in the image and they’ll say, oh, I love that, but is there any way to take that light out? And it’s like, oh yeah, that’s like easy-peasy.
Allison Tyler Jones: Even though we’ve told them at the beginning of the sales appointment.
Stacey Hemeyer: Exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: That nothing’s been retouched, you’re going to see a light in the corner and those will all be taken out. We’re so used to seeing something and knowing what it can be because we’ve done it day in, day out. But you really do have to almost over communicate of what this will look like. And so in that instance, if we’re dealing with a brand new client, we will typically, Stacey will go in and when I’m doing my final edit, I’ll say, okay, take these three images, clean up the background, do a pre-retouch, kind of like a down and dirty.
Allison Tyler Jones: We won’t do the full retouch, but just enough to where they can get an idea of what the final image is going to look like so that they can visualize. And then once they’ve been through our process one time, then they know we’ve got it handled so they don’t worry about it at all. And it’s almost like they don’t see it. It’s kind of interesting. The next time they come in, they just know, maybe they’ll bring in their husband that they didn’t bring before and he’ll say, oh, there’s a light in there. No, no, she totally takes that out. It’s completely fine. So it’s funny how just giving them one time through the process, they get it.
Stacey Hemeyer: And I would say the majority of our clients at this point trust that we’re going to do it right. Like, when we first started working together, you would always give me retouching notes, you know? This guy’s pant leg, take out pimple, whatever, you very rarely give me retouching notes anymore, and most of our clients approve on the first proof. So we’ve kind of got a good system down where basically we know what they want. They want to look their very best self, they want to be able to tell it’s them. They want to see their family, see their kids, but they also want to look as good as possible. And part of that is through the clothing choices and the lens choices and the…
Allison Tyler Jones: Lighting.
Stacey Hemeyer: Posing and lighting, but that final touch is the retouch.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, for sure. So you mentioned proofing. So we do, for large wall art and albums, we do send a proof to the client to approve before we print it. And so talk about that a little bit. How does that go?
Stacey Hemeyer: Well, first off, the way we do it is we watermark the image and then make a PDF, and then we email the client a PDF. And I have verbiage that I send, very similar to each client that says, hey, let’s say it’s for a card, it says, you ordered 100 cards. Here’s the…
Allison Tyler Jones: Just reiterates, yeah.
Stacey Hemeyer: Yeah, exactly. And it says, these images have been retouched. So then they’ll look at that and send me back any changes that they need. It very specifically says in our emails, please keep all changes to one email because what we’re finding…
Allison Tyler Jones: Which is hilarious because they never do, but yeah.
Stacey Hemeyer: And that is true, but I feel like they’re better. Before I felt like they’d say, oh, can you fix this eyelash? Okay, great, and I’d send them a new proof. And they’d go, oh, can you fix this bump on my husband’s pants? Okay, great. And now they’re pretty good at, first off, I’ve been doing it so long that I can anticipate so much of that, and so I just know to take it out. Even silly things like the reflection, for example, if they have a suit on, the reflection on a button can look like maybe it’s a piece of lint or I mean, if he’s wearing a black suit and there’s a reflection, it can be a white line that is very distracting. So I know to either take it out or soften it and just over years of doing it, I feel like we’re getting a lot less requests on what to change. But it does give them that opportunity to look at it and is there something distracting that they noticed that I didn’t notice?
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. And the proof that it’s a little bit fraught because depending on who you’re sending it to, with some clients, they feel like their due diligence isn’t done until they find something wrong. And then if they have a teenager, they’re zooming in on their phone to every pore, you know, and like, can you retouch the third pore from the nostril? And you’re like, okay, look, it’s never going to be that big. So having to manage the back and forth can be a little bit difficult or if they’re not getting back to you, that can be kind of difficult as well.
Stacey Hemeyer: Yeah, and that is the hardest part of proofing is so often they are going to approve it on the first proof, it’s just getting them to sit down and look at it. It can take me three or four emails or texts saying, hey, did you see this? We want to get this into production for you. And so it does take some prodding sometimes. The solution that you came up with just this last year that I think was genius is when we have people that are really dragging their feet and we don’t quite know why it’s to set up a Zoom call. And myself, Allison and the client will look at the proof together, and we had one guy who was like, I think we might need a reshoot. We need to redo this. Oh my goodness. Well, we sit down and go on the Zoom call, and his actual changes were so minor.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. But he built it up in his head. That was an example of somebody that didn’t realize what we could do. Didn’t realize that it, yes, your little bit of belly fat hanging over your belt can be tucked. We can tuck that up, no big deal.
Stacey Hemeyer: Or he had a little acne scarring. And most men, we don’t retouch as much because a man that’s a little craggily or a little wrinkly still looks great, I thought he looked great, but he’s one of those men who wants to look perfect. So he just needed to be retouched a little bit more like I would a woman. And he was thrilled out of his mind.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right? Exactly, exactly. And sometimes you don’t know that. So if somebody’s dragging their feet and they can’t, they’re going back and forth, sometimes it’s better to just jump on a call to where you’re looking at the same thing or have them come back in and look at it together so that you can wrap it up. Because that’s, again, another part of managing the expectation is that you are both looking at the same thing and on the same page. Okay. Let’s talk about the idea of just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it.
Stacey Hemeyer: Yes. I think there are so many examples of this, but I’m going to share one that was early in my photography career. I was getting pretty darn good at Photoshop, I would say, better than the average photographer. And so I was starting, and this was 20 years ago, but I was starting to do head swaps and things like that that a lot of photographers weren’t doing. And people were coming to me because of what I could retouch and change. And I had this client come and it was a husband and wife and a small child, and the husband had this lazy eye. And so I’m like, well, I’m so good at head swaps, I’m just going to fix his eye. So I did, and it looked good, and I sent them to his wife, and his wife called me and she’s like, Stacey, he has had that lazy eye his whole life, and he’s really spent years trying to be okay with it and he finally is, and you changed it, and it kind of hurt his feelings. And I was, oh, it was a knife in my heart. I wanted to cry.
Allison Tyler Jones: Devastating.
Stacey Hemeyer: ‘Cause I…
Allison Tyler Jones: You never want to make somebody feel…
Stacey Hemeyer: Yes, I thought I was doing something to make him feel better about himself and instead, I pushed an insecurity button, which is never my goal. And so I quickly refixed those and sent them to them, or even with thinning people.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yes, especially young girls,
Stacey Hemeyer: Yes, you thin a young girl and one girl will love it, another girl will be devastated that I felt I needed to thin her. How dare you. So it is a tight rope to walk.
Allison Tyler Jones: Also skin tone.
Stacey Hemeyer: Oh, skin tone is a big thing, yeah. You need to, especially in a mixed race couple where your lighting, and if lighting’s perfect on one, it might be too light or too dark on the other. So you want to balance that light, but at the same time, you do not change skin tone on someone.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right.
Stacey Hemeyer: That’s a big no-no, so you have to be really careful.
Allison Tyler Jones: And it’s things that we don’t realize being a white woman, you’re just like, oh, I just want to fix this and make this kid look cute or whatever, and you don’t realize that maybe you lighten their skin and then it doesn’t look like them. And that can be very hurtful and trigger a lot of really hard things that you just never even thought about.
Stacey Hemeyer: Exactly.
Allison Tyler Jones: So it’s, again, just because you can change it doesn’t mean that you should. Another thought is scars. You kind of have philosophy, yeah, what is it?
Stacey Hemeyer: So my big philosophy is if it’s something that will heal or go away, say a pimple, totally taking that out, unless they didn’t want me to, but I’ve never once had someone say, please don’t take out my acne. But if it’s permanent…
Allison Tyler Jones: Or a scratch or…
Stacey Hemeyer: Exactly, if it’s permanent, I kind of will either talk to the client, see how they feel about it, or just slightly soften it. ‘Cause you don’t want it to detract, like let’s say they have a big scar on their forehead, you don’t want it to detract from their look, but if they are secure and don’t mind it being there, you might want to just soften it slightly just so it doesn’t take focus.
Allison Tyler Jones: And parents can be very, there’s a wide range on that. I have parents that, like say they have a child that has a port wine stain or that’s been, tried to laser or whatever, so I’ve had some that’ll say, please take that off because we hope that in the future the technology will be better and it will be gone. And then others that will say, please don’t take that off, because if technology is better in the future and it’s gone, I still want to remember that he had that at this age.
Stacey Hemeyer: They were, yeah.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah.
Stacey Hemeyer: It’s kind of like with braces. Can we take it off? Yes, we can. Should we? I don’t think so, in most cases. Like in most cases, this is your awkward 14-year-old, and someday they’re not going to be that awkward 14-year-old. Someday they’re going to be this beautiful human and they’re going to be perfect with…
Allison Tyler Jones: With straight teeth.
Stacey Hemeyer: Exactly. But the braces, that’s such a rite of passage now.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah.
Stacey Hemeyer: And capture that instead of thinking that you have to be perfect at all times. Those imperfections are what make us who we are at that time. And so I don’t think we necessarily want to remove braces and things like that.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah, and I think being able to guide your client through that, sometimes they don’t know, and so they’re like, well, should I? Or should and I? And so having the conversation with them and allowing them to kind of explore that like, well, do you want to remember this phase when they had a broken arm or they had braces or they had, whatever this temporary thing is that’s happening right now, do you want to remember that? I definitely fall on that side because we are weird and we like to keep the band-aids in or whatever. But like you said, if it wasn’t that big of a deal and they don’t really care and it’s going to heal, maybe you would, but to have the conversation, just don’t automatically do it.
Stacey Hemeyer: Yeah, I agree.
Allison Tyler Jones: The slimming is a big one. I feel like for women our age down to, I don’t know, what would you say? 45, you’re pretty fine.
Stacey Hemeyer: You’re pretty safe.
Allison Tyler Jones: But once you get below that, you better start asking some questions because that can trigger some feelings.
Stacey Hemeyer: And I find that most people, the saying, the camera adds 10 pounds, it really does. On most of our shoots, if I’m not shooting when Allison’s shooting, I’m assisting. And so I see our clients and interact with them, but every once in a while I won’t. And I’ll be working on their photos, and then I’ll see them in real life and I’m like, oh my gosh, they’re so much thinner than I thought they were.
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah.
Stacey Hemeyer: And it’s really a strange thing, but the camera does add weight. And so we’ll have clients who come in that are these tiny little things, but in pictures, they don’t look quite as tiny. And so everyone does need a little bit of…
Allison Tyler Jones: A little something. Well, and that’s one thing when we have a new client, even if we’ve retouched a couple of the images, and they usually will buy those because those are the ones that they like because horrified at how they look. But that goes back to the managing expectations. So I will let the client know like, okay, nothing has been retouched. And so then sometimes they’ll look and say, I just feel like I look so old. And I’m like, you know what? Actually you do look older and heavier in this than, I’m looking at you right now, and I don’t see those lines in your face. But because we’re lighting dramatically, we’re doing dimensional lighting from the side, so that’s going to pick up all the texture in your face. Or if they’re really thin and they have that vein in their forehead, but you can see that vein, like for a woman, it will really pronounce that. So they’ll say, I didn’t think I looked that old. It’s like, you don’t look that old.
Stacey Hemeyer: When we’re done retouching.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right, but that’s why we’ve got to smoother some of this out. So it’s letting them know, because I mean, it’s horrifying. Whenever you update my headshots and my pictures, I just tell you now, I don’t want to see them until you’ve retouched them. Because I just am like, I’m the crypt keeper, I look so old, you know? Hate it.
Stacey Hemeyer: But I have to say, on this last round that we just did, you thought I had photoshopped you skinnier, and I hadn’t. You actually just looked that good.
Allison Tyler Jones: Well, yeah, you just pose me well, and wearing all black does not hurt.
Stacey Hemeyer: All black definitely helps us, doesn’t it?
Allison Tyler Jones: Yeah. Okay, so I want to wrap up with using retouching to solve a problem or basically to surprise and delay a client. So we have a client that they’d come for every year for years as their kids, their boys were growing up and, they have three boys, and their oldest son was getting married, and it was kind of like, let’s do the last family picture. But they did include the fiancé in the picture, and I think it was the day before they got married. So because they knew that the next boy wasn’t going to be married for a while, ’cause he was much younger, they were like, okay, we’re going to make this big. And they wanted it in their dining room. They framed it with this super Lux premium frame, I think the frame itself was probably $3,500.
Allison Tyler Jones: It was spectacular. It was so beautiful. And so we did this portrait and you retouched it, and it was beautiful. Well, about a year later, her neighbor came in for her view and order and she said, did you hear about this client’s son that they were only married for six months and then they got a divorce? And I said, you are kidding me. I said, what did she do with that, with the portrait? And she says, it’s in the back of the closet. She can’t even face looking at it. So this woman had spent thousands of dollars on this portrait and hadn’t called us, hadn’t said anything, because again, what does she even know that anything could happen, right? But we found this out. And so as I am having this conversation with the client, you, Stacey, overheard it, and as the client left, you said, hey, I think we can take her out and reprint the picture. And this was probably two weeks before Christmas of that year.
Stacey Hemeyer: It was right by Christmas.
Allison Tyler Jones: It was so fast, yeah, it was like right, right on Christmas. So I texted the client’s husband and I said, hey, I heard about your boy. So sorry. We can get this reprinted. If you can get us the frame over to our framer, we will retouch it, her out, reprint it, and then you can give it to her for Christmas. And he said, well, oh my gosh, that would be amazing, how much do I owe you? And I said, no, no, it’s guaranteed. Like, absolutely, this is, if your kid had knocked it off the wall with his Nerf gun, we would’ve reprinted it. And this is one of those situations, and they have been a long time client. They’ve been amazing. So we did it. He picked it up and it was like the most amazing thing ever.
Stacey Hemeyer: Yeah, it was awesome. And it was one of those things that it was when you and I very first started working together, so I don’t know that you really even knew that I could do that. And I was like, Allison, guess what? I’m like, I can fix this. And you got on and it was such the perfect surprise and delight. He was thrilled. And obviously his wife was thrilled, and they’ve come back many times since then. And so it is amazing what we can do but again, that doesn’t mean that you always should do it.
Allison Tyler Jones: Right. But it’s part of that overall, it fits so nicely. Your skillset fits so nicely and is an integral part of the service that we offer in that we want everybody to look their best, but we want them to be real. We want everybody to be close. We want to be able to guarantee our work, even when horrible things happen in families. And we’ve had that happen multiple times. Now we know, just put the in-laws on the outside of the pose and step away a little bit, only have one arm behind them. Okay, let’s get one where, just kidding, but kind of not kidding. Anyway, so I appreciate your expertise. I know that our listeners are going to love some of these pointers and tips that you’ve had, and thank you for being here.
Stacey Hemeyer: Well, thanks for having me. It’s always fun.
Allison Tyler Jones: Thank you.
Recorded: You can find more great resources from Allison at DoTheReWork.com and on Instagram at Do.The.ReWork.
