corporate photography

Retouching Myths That Cost You Money

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First impressions matter in business. In a digital world, your images are often your first impression.

Yet, many companies and professionals underestimate the impact of high-quality retouching, often because they’ve fallen for common myths. Believing these myths can cost you credibility, engagement, and even revenue.

Why would an eyeglass manufacturer use a photo like this? Not only do the lens reflections distract from the eyeglass frames, but you can also see reflections of the photographer. Even though the model has good makeup and hair, the photo still screams “amateur.” Thankfully retouching can save the photo.

Here are some common misconceptions and the cost behind them.
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Professional Retouchers See What Customers Don’t

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The original photo of this business owner will look okay to many people. But there are many things “wrong” with the picture.

After colour, contrast, and brightness are corrected, skin tone evened, image straightened, and all background distractions removed, the photo becomes cleaner and more professional looking. There are no longer any distractions taking away from the person’s face.

When a customer looks at a photo, they see a person, a building, or a moment.

When a professional retoucher looks at the same photo, they see a hundred small details that influence how that image *feels* and whether it quietly builds trust or subtly erodes it.

Great retouching isn’t necessarily about dramatic change. It’s about small refinements.
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Business Attitudes Toward Photos

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1.   We know our website photos are lousy, but we don’t care.
 
These businesses view website photos as a necessary evil. Image quality doesn’t matter to them because photos are used only to fill empty space on website pages.

2.   We don’t know our photos are low quality.
 
These businesses use photos taken by employees or other amateurs. They think all images are essentially the same because they don’t understand how to use photography.

3.   Our photos are technically perfect, but they still fall short.
 
This is especially common with business headshots, where the lighting may be ideal, but the pose or facial expression doesn’t convey the right message. The reason is always that the company hired a low-priced photographer because cheaper is seen as better. Inexperienced photographers don’t understand the true function of business photography.

4.   We know when our photos are weak and we make an effort to fix them.
 
These businesses recognize the importance of brand image and understand that photos are a key communication tool. They make an effort to reshoot or retouch images when necessary in order to maintain their brand reputation.

 

Which one best describes your business?

 

Business Photography of Yesteryear

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The need for business photography, commercial photography and advertising photography has existed almost as long as photography itself.

 

An advertisement for the McLaughlin Carriage Company of Oshawa, Ontario, circa 1907. Early advertising used drawings, photo engravings or photo etchings. (Library and Archives Canada)

Early advertising illustrations for newspapers, billboards and posters were created from drawings, photo engravings or photo etchings. The first use of halftones to reproduce a continuous tone photograph was in 1869 in Canada but it took several decades before it became common practice.

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Balancing Act

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There are three types of colour photographs: those with bad colour, those with accurate colour and those with pleasing colour.

If the skin tones in your business portrait don’t look good or if your pictures have an overall colour cast, then your photos have a bad colour balance.

Accurate colour is required when the colours in a photo must match the real-life colours. For example, clothing colours in a catalog should match the actual colours.

Pleasing colour is for pictures that have to look nice rather than be absolutely accurate. Portraits often have pleasing colour because a nice skin tone is usually preferred over accurate skin colour.
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Procuring Photography

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Another view-from-my-office photo. I was photographing a parade a few days ago and lots of people came out just to watch me work :-)

Someone this week asked for a quote to photograph “a one day corporate business event” they were hosting on a specific date “at a downtown Toronto location.” No further information was provided.

The person used a Gmail address with a rather silly username instead of a business email address. Surely an organization big enough to host a “corporate business event” would have its own company address.
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Keeping Up With The Times

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September is the start of a new school year and every student will be getting new school portraits done. When is your company planning to get new pictures?

Every business needs to refresh the photos on their web site. Refreshing your web site shows that your company is still alive and it keeps customers interested. It also helps your site rank higher in web searches.

The second most popular search engine after Google is Google Images. This image search engine is used more than all other search engines combined excluding Google itself.

This means that people using Google Images are searching visually (because we process pictures much faster than text) and they will click on the best looking or most interesting pictures. Stock pictures are rarely interesting because stock pictures look like stock pictures. Of course, having no pictures means you’re invisible.
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