What I Do

Yeah, promised to make a post about this, so here it is!

I started working a couple of months ago as a 'digital imaging artist' at a photography studio that mainly handles work for print ads.

I do the post-production work on the jobs that come in, and the requirements vary greatly depending on the job. Usually its doing surgical work such as extracting the 'subject' from the studio's background, sometimes swapping out various body parts, then putting it into a new background image.

Sounds simple, but it really isn't, as every single detail needs to be attended to, every imperfection and elements that cause 'visual noise' which distracts the viewer from the subject.

Working in high-res is highly demanding in terms of attention to detail, as there is scant room to simply leave alone the areas that are difficult to fix or clean up, because even the smallest and most subtle of details really stand out like a sore thumb when it goes into print. Even the deviation of a pixel or two in a line is very visible, which makes it necessary to be very careful and precise.

Every assignment is usually a fresh new challenge, as the problems are individual to the image itself, and quite abit of creative thinking, looking through many tutorials and lots of trial and error are required to solve them. Before being introduced to this job, I really took the amount of work put into ads for granted.

Raw photographs that don't require any digital retouching are very rare, especially since high-end cameras can capture an amazing amount of detail; in fact they capture too much, and its up to the retoucher's job to make it as clean and perfect as possible.

Deadlines are quite insane, as clients generally feel that post-production work is simple compared to photography, which can't really be rushed due to a higher amount of logistics involved, and usually want to see finished work a day after a photoshoot.
Sometimes, the job is so behind schedule, (usually due to too much time wasted on planning) that they want to see finished work an hour or two right after the shoot itself, and before office hours are over. Which of course requires me to go into overdrive mode to try and get the raw photos at least into presentable shape for sending a low-res preview. Some clients even expect you to work over the weekend, giving the job on Friday and wanting results on Monday. Fun.

So, if you are part of the realisation of an ad, keep in mind that the process is like making a cake. Planning, concepting and photographing is preparing the ingredients. Digital retouching and post production is mixing the ingredients together and baking the cake. Try to rush the baking process and the result is poorly baked flour.

There's two sides to every coin, however and I can't deny that it has its advantages, as I get to train myself to work faster, plan faster and make decisions faster instead of spending hours staring at the screen thinking of what to do.

Its a very demanding job, to say the least, but i'm sticking to it for now. I consider the nice work environment, nice colleagues, boss who acts more like a friend than a 'boss' and a place where i'm picking up some skills I need for my long-term goals as a reasonably good compromise for the relatively low pay and unpredictable working hours as well as the occasional insane client.