How do you become a retoucher?

There are a few routes into the profession - here's is how I did it:

After leaving Art College I needed an outlet for my creative talents and started "testing" - shooting fashion models portfolios. I gained a great deal of experience and I became a freelance professional photographer.

I spent years developing film, working in darkrooms, making colour and black-and-white prints, and retouching them with brushes and photo dyes. Eventually I switched to digital imaging and loved the convenience working with a computer.

I taught myself Photoshop in a year of intense study, and I developed my retouching skills on my own commercial photography.

Other photographers began to give me retouching work and I became experienced and confident enough to take on complex technical and creative work.

If you already have reasonable Photoshop skills you could try a more direct approach and look for work in advertising agencies. The pay would probably be low and the hours long but you would get to know the industry from the inside and make valuable contacts.

Photographers sometimes advertise for assistants who can also retouch their images. Again the pay would be low, but you would get lots of experience of real world retouching. You would probably need to do unpaid work experience as a "second assistant" to learn how to help in studios and on location.

Unless you are lucky or persistent enough to get a full-time job the only way you can survive as a freelance retoucher is to have lots of good contacts. You need to spend at least as much time cultivating contacts as you did developing you Photoshop skills. The value of assisting busy photographers is that you will meet plenty lots of the right sorts of people.

Try professional photographers associations for email addresses. Send a polite email with appreciative comments about the photographers work. Get your own website with examples of your retouching work and include a link to it. Never attach megabytes of jpegs to your unsolicited email - it will just be junked unopened.

It's usless trying to get jobs with graphic designers, or even work experience, unless you are proficient at not only Photoshop but also Quark or InDesigm, Dreamweaver, and Flash.

Freelance retouching can be very tough work.. Advertising agencies, photographers, and magazines only give me the complex or difficult creative stuff they can't do themselves. These clients expect an awful lot of technical an artistic ability, and can be trying to work for. You have to be able to do whatever is required and there is always a tight deadline!

In my experience the three most important things you need to be a retoucher are contacts, contacts, and more contacts.

Good luck, and may the Force be with you!