Some retouching requests sound very simple when they are written in a brief.
“Make the waist slightly smaller.”
“Reduce this fold.”
“Move the hair a little.”
“Clean the edge of the dress.”
“Reduce this fold.”
“Move the hair a little.”
“Clean the edge of the dress.”
Sometimes they really are small changes. Sometimes one adjustment quietly affects half the image.
Changing the shape of a body can alter clothing, background lines, shadows, proportions, and even the way the pose reads. Removing a fold may mean rebuilding texture underneath it. Moving hair can expose an area of skin or clothing that was never visible in the original photograph. Correcting one reflection can affect several neighboring surfaces.
The visible request may take only a few words. The work behind it can involve a chain of decisions.
This is one reason I try to look beyond the specific area mentioned in the brief before making the correction. What is connected to it? What will move with it? What will need to be reconstructed? Will the change still look physically believable when the image is viewed as a whole?
Sometimes the safest correction is also the most limited one. Push the change slightly too far and suddenly several other parts of the photograph need to be adjusted just to support it.
This becomes especially important when a client asks for revisions. A request that sounds like a tiny additional change may actually require reopening decisions that were already balanced in the previous version.
The size of a retouching request is not always defined by how much of the image it occupies.
Sometimes a few pixels are connected to everything around them.