M. Seth Jones

And a writer.

As well as a long haired, bearded misfit.

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The art of transparency: presenting Cristian Girotto – Page 0

August 24, 2011

The
art of
transparency:
presenting
Cristian
Girotto

The art of transparency: presenting Cristian Girotto – Page 1

August 24, 2011

Let’s face it; retouching isn’t really a high profile career choice. Outside the realms of a few highly cliquey online forums, most people, even those who consume fashion photography on a daily basis, probably couldn’t reel off a list of their favourite retouchers. Even within those somewhat segregated discussion forums, from the mouths of both aspiring and established retouchers, the same names tend to appear again and again: Chris Tarantino, Amy Dresser, Pascal Dangin, Natalia Taffarel, Vitaly Druchinin. Household names? Not likely. Maybe Amy Dresser, at a stretch, or for the observant The Devil Wears Prada viewer, possibly Pascal Dangin, but for the majority of consumers of fashion imagery, it’s a largely anonymous, generally unconsidered role (unless either BP or Ralph Lauren are involved).

Cristian Girotto is a retoucher whose work I stumbled across some time ago, whose name I wish I saw mentioned more often amongst those aforementioned forums. A trend I’ve noticed, within these discussions, is that those names that do gain momentum on everyone’s list of favourites are usually those who, amongst other factors, adopt a certain kind of flashy retouching style. It’s a style that, more often than not, transforms an image from real into hyper-real, and in the process, makes a very clear statement: this image you are looking at is most definitely retouched.

The art of transparency: presenting Cristian Girotto – Page 2

August 24, 2011

Don’t get me wrong; the best retouchers out there do this with a level of skill that elevates the final rendering far beyond what most other Photoshop practitioners could achieve. Yet our eyes can identify it: we are viewing an image that we could not encounter without the many hours of enhancements these post-production practioners have added to it.

Cristian’s website provides a great starting point to reveal the power of restraint and subtlety when it comes to a good retouch. Displaying each of his works as a before and after comparison, Girotto’s work is imbued with the tenets of a skilled high end retoucher: that to achieve the best results, you need to not only recognise which elements in an image require attention, but which of those needs to be left alone as well. Exercising restraint, his work is about as close to transparent as retouching can get. Even in his beauty work, quite often the domain of the hyper-real, high-gloss and ultra luminous, Girotto espouses the notion of enhancing only that which already exists in the capture, focusing on softening gradients, making minor structural changes and, above all else, balancing hues to realise an aesthetically pleasing finish. It’s the very model of a truly minimal, subtractive approach to retouching: remove only that which distracts the eye from viewing the true image the photographer set out to capture.