One thing everyone wants when they have their picture taken is to look their best! A photographer does their best to get the perfect lighting, background and expression from the client, but that's only half the story. The other half of the equation is photo editing. There are tools in editing software that can improve the way someone looks. Some photographers debate whether portraits should be edited at all, but what most people and some beginning photographers don't know is, that there is no such thing as "no editing." I'll prove my point! There are several digital formats to shoot a photograph in. Just for simplicity and time, I'm only going to talk about the JPG and the RAW format.

JPG-  Most cell phones and digital cameras are by default set to JPG. While you might think that a JPG requires no editing, you're wrong. JPG's are a much smaller format than a RAW file, and what people don't realize is that the camera computer does the editing for you.  It selects what it considers necessary and then throws away great amounts of information in order to make the file small and easy to present on the internet. So that means the computer in your camera is the editor of your images! The bad news is that I don't always like what the computer kept around! The great thing about JPG is that it can save a bunch of time. However, you're limited in your ability to fix problems, such as shooting in the wrong white balance, over/under exposed areas or fixing color casts from unseen lighting sources.

RAW- I always use RAW images for portraits, because they're like a safety net! Any photographer who isn't shooting in the RAW format must be perfect and never make mistakes. There were a few times on vacations or wildlife shoots, that I used JPG and wished that I had shot in RAW. The RAW format allows you to switch between white balances and can even recover information in photos that might be too dark or bright. You just can't do that in JPG. RAW files are huge! The downside is that RAW files fill up a hard drive much quicker than JPG's. Hard drives are pretty inexpensive these days and this isn't really an issue anymore. 

I feel like editing a photo is perfectly acceptable and I always do some degree of skin touching to my images. It is possible to go overboard! One thing I have learned is to leave as much detail in the skin as possible. When I edit a portrait, I like to keep it as realistic as possible.

You can see in the senior portrait editing sequence, the retouching that I perform on her skin. The model actually had braces and it made her lips stick out more because of the metal attached to her teeth. That was the hardest part of the editing sequence. I then edit out blemishes and even out the lighting on her skin while retaining details.