What is the difference between author’s fine art retouch and basic retouch?

Basic retouch or light retouch is a complex of actions to make a photo usable for viewing, publishing and printing. It includes color and light correction, brightness and contrast, cropping if it’s necessary. You can use such pictures for your social media, printed photo albums or photo books. Usually I give a whole digital gallery with best pictures from the photo shooting. 

Author’s fine art retouch or artistic retouch is an artwork. It’s much more complicated and labour-consuming. It includes manual correction of all skin defects (acne, wrinkles, dark circles etc.), light body shape correction if it’s necessary, correction of background details, adding of sharpness, light, contrast and special effects. Also sometimes it includes stylization of the picture if photographer makes photos in specific style like fairy tale, urban and so on. You can keep such photo in a photo frame as one of the most important and memorable, also it’s useful for photo albums, posting in social media and so on.

Sometimes it takes more than an hour to retouch 1 photo in artistic manner, that is why such kind of pictures are always limited in photographer’s packages and cost for additional photos is high. 

Here you can see the difference between artistic retouch 👉🏼basic retouch 👉🏼 and RAW photo.