The business of photography and retouching
Business portraits don’t have to look like glorified passport photos. Start by having a conversation with your photographer about creating something more dynamic than a flat image against a plain wall. Specifically, ask about lighting. Small creative lighting choices can make a big difference in how you come across.
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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.
Here are some common misconceptions and the cost behind them.
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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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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?
If you’re a new photographer who does business headshots and other corporate portraits, may I offer some brief advice?
I just spent an hour looking at a few dozen Toronto law firm websites, and most of them had poor quality business portraits.
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The need for business photography, commercial photography and advertising photography has existed almost as long as photography itself.
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.
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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