Retouching in Portrait Photography
Find out how photographers use retouching to enhance their final image.
By Alessandro Nasini, Senior Curator of Photographs
Reading time: 7 minutes
Retouching is a practice as old as photography itself, and a key stage of a typical portrait commission. It can be as simple as cropping an image, or as complex as removing entire backgrounds. Photographers across the decades, such as William Edward Kilburn, Marcus Adams, Dorothy Wilding and Cecil Beaton, used a variety of techniques to enhance their final image.
Historically, retouching helped the shortcomings of the long exposures needed in the mid-19th century, when photography was first introduced. For example, a cloudy sky and a subject could not be captured at the same time. Clouds would be added physically to the final image or recorded on a separate negative to create a composite final image – when a single image is created out of two or more photographs. In this daguerreotype (a photograph produced on a silvered copper plate) of Prince Albert by William Edward Kilburn, the clouds have been hand painted.
As exposure times could be several minutes long, it was difficult to capture clear, sharp images due to movement. This meant that even a quick blink of the eyes would be recorded as a blur. In this photograph by Carol Szathmari, the infantry soldier’s eyes required direct retouching, which eventually became apparent as the photograph faded over time.
How did photographers approach retouching?
Retouching is – and has always been – one of the tools that photographers use to express their artistic vision and shape their final work. Portrait photography, unlike other genres of photography such as photojournalism or documentary photography, is a creative process. Photographers can decide if and how to use retouching as part of their aesthetics and artistic process.
Portrait photography is also a collaboration between the sitter and photographer, which develops throughout the commission. Retouching may be discussed as part of this process and, on occasion, be requested by the sitter.
For example, following Cecil Beaton’s sitting with Princess Louise in 1927, correspondence between the Princess's lady-in-waiting and the photographer outlined which features the Princess wished to have enhanced and what had to be ‘slightly toned down’. Despite noting that the photograph ‘had received already a great deal of attention’, Beaton further enhanced the portrait accordingly.
While some photographers only retouched selected portraits, others preferred to retouch before providing their sitters with proofs. Dorothy Wilding gave clear instructions to her staff never to show an un-retouched proof to a sitter. In this proof of Princess Alice (above), Wilding annotated it on the back: 'needs hair "tidying" where pencilled!'
Methods of Retouching
Retouching a photograph created with analogue (pre-digital) technology can occur at any of the following three stages:
1. Modifying the negative
2. Manipulating the image during printing
3. Direct retouching on the final print
Modifying the negative
The negative can be etched, rubbed, or drawn on to create the desired image.
In these images of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (when Duke and Duchess of York) with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, we can see Marcus Adams’s manual intervention to create an oval vignette effect. This was achieved by scraping and rubbing off the gelatin emulsion on the negative and adding marks in white pencil, which appear black on the final print. Very small touched-up areas in graphite are also present on some of the sitters’ faces. Additionally, the negative reveals the studio setting, invisible in the final print.
In some instances, a negative would even be cut. In this double portrait of The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Dorothy Wilding modified the negative to produce a single portrait of the Duke. One side of the negative was spliced off and then reattached further up, creating space to 'fill in' the part of the Duke’s shoulder originally obscured by the Duchess. Pencil lines indicate where the final image would be cropped.
By placing the image under raking light (lighting the image from one side, at a low angle) we can also see the extensive direct retouching with graphite on The Duke of Windsor’s face. Wilding used very strong studio lights which emphasised the sitter’s facial features but also revealed ‘unfair exaggerations’ that would not be seen in person under ordinary lighting. She employed retouchers to hide all the ‘lines and folds and creases in a face’ that would have stood out on the negative, to create a natural-looking final portrait.
Manipulating the image during printing
Controlling light exposure in the darkroom is the most common way to retouch a photograph. Three techniques – 'masking', 'burning' and 'dodging' – are used to reduce or bring out details of an image.
A photographer might 'mask' areas to block light completely. 'Burning' is used to make an image darker by exposing it to light for longer while printing. In contrast, 'dodging' makes an image lighter by shielding areas from light exposure when printing. These techniques can be applied to the whole print or, more commonly, in specific areas using tools or just their hands.
In this proof of a portrait of Princess Margaret, Snowdon marked in red the areas that he would like to be 'dodged' – this is the meaning of the instruction ‘Print softer – please’, written on the proof.
Direct retouching on the final print
Direct retouching of a finished print can involve toning the paper to cooler or warmer shades or using coloured pencils or dyes to draw directly onto the photograph.
While some photographers prefer to retouch and print their own work, others collaborate regularly with professional printers and retouchers, who are highly specialised in such crafts.
Although retouching, in all its forms, is intended to be as invisible as possible on the final version of a work, there are some tell-tale signs that can occasionally be spotted, especially when applied directly on the print. Sometimes just looking at a photograph from different angles can reveal direct retouching. For example, by examining Cecil Beaton’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II under raking light, areas that have been retouched are more visible.
Retouching in the Digital Age
While the delicate and skilful task of analogue retouching once took hours of painstaking work to complete, today’s photo-editing software makes the process faster and more straightforward. All the above techniques have been replicated in digital forms of photographic retouching and new ones have been developed as part of digital post-production tools.
Renowned British photographer Rankin was chosen as one of ten photographers to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee in 2002. After capturing the sitter on film in the Ballroom at Buckingham Palace, he produced two versions of the portrait.
This second version, released as an ‘unseen portrait’ during the Jubilee, was produced by digitally superimposing his original portrait of the monarch onto a photograph of a specially purchased Union Flag, offering an alternative, patriotic portrait of the monarch as a symbol of the nation.
