Today we live in a social media age, where everything is about pictures and looking good. Nobody is perfect. Everyone comes with flaws and beauty is accepting the way we are including the flaws. However, that’s not the case when it comes to the actual world. Everybody wants to look flawless, especially as far as his or her photos are concerned and this is majorly due to the presence of media in our life. What most people don’t understand that the seemingly flawless pictures that we uploaded on the media are the superb job of photo retouching.

Photo retouching is also known as airbrushing or retouching. It is basically a process of manipulating or editing photographs to change the looks of the person or the subject in a subtle manner. This, in short, includes fixing small glitches like erasing pimples or changing an uneven complexion to appear even.

An experienced photo retoucher would even be able to make someone appear thin or fat or merge more than two pictures seamlessly. Earlier photographers and photo retouchers were different. However, now that’s not the case nowadays. The trend nowadays is for the photographers and the photo retouchers are the same.

The photo retouching can be done mostly using a different and complex application. The number of changes that can be made via photo retouching is endless. You can sharpen images or blur images depending on what you need to be done.

However, these are the two most common uses of Photoshop. Then comes removing blemishes on the face, like scars and pimples, which is another popular alteration done to the photograph. Sometimes the retouching might involve changing the tone of the person’s skin.

In other words, giving a more youthful and smoother appearance to the person’s skin. The extreme changes would be making a person look slimmer or fatter. At times, only certain parts of the picture would be edited like the chin of the neck and not the entire body of the person. Sometimes the background is not very clear or there might be a need to superimpose the image of the person on a different background.

The editing of the image is done using different layers. However, it’s the job of the retoucher to ensure that he saves the final merged picture and provides a copy of the same. in case a hard copy is needed, it would be printed on a photo paper, which is a high-quality paper designed specifically to print photos.

Today the world we live in has become very artificial and it’s more the physical appearance that counts more than the internal beauty of the person. Also, this has further created the need to be perfect and flawless, giving an impression of
perfection, which is not the case most of the times. Today photo retouching can be done at an amateur level using apps designed for mobiles, which are also very popular. However, at the end of the day, we need to decide what matters more to us the flawless look or the flawed look that shows who we actually are.