Retouching

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part of Post-Production · tier 2 · 0 pieces of work carry it · 3 crafts it is confused with

The craft, and who hires it

Hired to make photography flawless for market: beauty retouching for fashion and cosmetics campaigns, product cleanup for e-commerce and print, final polish on hero key visuals before release. (The vendor benchmark found no distinct sell-side vocabulary for this leaf — it is typically bundled inside photography/post offerings.)

The craft of pixel-level cleanup, correction, and enhancement of still imagery: beauty and skin work, product cleanup, object and rig removal, and high-end polishing of campaign photography to a flawless finished standard.

Tag it when…

Tag when finished photography shows evident work beyond capture: flawless product surfaces, cleaned backgrounds, beauty-standard skin work, removed rigging or distractions — perfection on photographic source material that a camera alone does not produce.

Never tag it when…

Never tag the photography itself — capture craft goes to the Photography leaves (Product, Still Life, Editorial…). Never tag polish on rendered CGI — a clean 3D render is 3D Design craft with no photographic source to retouch. Merging multiple photographic sources into a new image goes to Compositing; global tonal treatments go to Color Grading.

Easily mistaken for 3 other crafts

Every other page suggests neighbours by similarity. This one navigates by difference: each line names the craft this is confused with, and the rule for telling them apart.

• visual effects vfx 2d compositing — Compositing merges MULTIPLE sources into a new image; Retouching perfects a SINGLE photographic image.
• post production color grading — Grading is global color/tone across the image or film; Retouching is local, pixel-level repair and enhancement.
• photography product / photography still life — The shot is Photography craft; the invisible-seams perfection on top of it is Retouching. Tag both only when each is separately evident.

At what size it applies

Asset tag on stills — the retouched photograph IS the deliverable. Rarely moment-grain; a retouched still appearing as one beat inside a video is at most a moment tag on that segment.

Where to look next

• The whole services tree — the services index.
• Every other vocabulary — the vocabulary index.
• How work gets credited to a craft — the entities chapter.