Photo retouching is an important job that doesn't get the credit it deserves. Today, basic things like color correction, lens adjustments and red-eye removal may happen inside the camera before a human retoucher even sees the image. However, retouchers and photographers are equally necessary on many projects, especially when the finished artwork is "made in the darkroom."

I've toiled in Photoshop for hundreds of hours, smoothing wrinkles from clothing, removing dust and fingerprints from shiny objects and addressing all of the tedious details that are necessary before sending a catalog or advertisement to print. Most retouching isn't glamourous.

As a matter of fact, glamour retouching is my least favorite kind. I've been asked to make models look younger or more beautiful, but those models were already beautiful. I questioned the ethics of certain projects after these same models told me that they didn’t recognize themselves anymore.

The retouching work that I'm most proud of had a common process: I had an idea for a picture, then I cobbled together the basic rudiments of a photograph any way that I could, and finally, I used Photoshop to mold the "duct-tape and bubble gum" into something close to what I had imagined.

Below are a few photos that fit that bill. They're not necessarily the best retouching work that I've done, or even the most notable (Garry Kasparov is the coolest client I've had). Nevertheless, I think that the images below are among the most interesting pieces in my retouching portfolio.

P.S. A big thanks to the JuxtaposeJS team at Knight Lab for making these Javascript image sliders available free of charge. For those reading this on a phone, I apologize for the blank white spaces appearing beneath each image. This is a side effect of using embedded i-frames.

Example #1: Exposure and Color Correction

Almost every photo needs some kind of exposure or color adjustment to look its best. The difference between before-and-after photos can literally look like night and day.

This photo of plastic army men battling a raccoon is one of my favorites. Yes, it's a photo. I found a stuffed raccoon, some toys and a box of sparklers in my aunt's garage and this was the result. The sparklers were the only source of light, and despite the 30-second exposure, the photo was underexposed. I used Photoshop to brighten it up and to make the colors pop.

Example #2: Removing a Person From the Photo

After college, my friend Eddie and I co-founded a fashion magazine called Debonair. The premise of the magazine was about how to look good on a shoestring budget, and we applied that same philosophy when we bootstrapped our photoshoots. "Faceless Fashion" was a regular feature where the model was photoshopped out of the clothes, leaving behind an invisible-man-like outfit. We did this because we were the models (and models we were not).

Example #3: Giving Life to Inanimate Objects

A colleague of mine started a men's neckwear business. He didn't have much money to spend on photos and marketing materials, so hiring a model was out of the question. We brainstormed, and as I thought about neckties, the comic strip Dilbert came to mind. (I didn't mention this, of course.)

Dilbert's tie is always upturned as if a gust of wind followed him everywhere he went. I like quirky details like that, so I pitched "ties in the sky,” blissfully unaware of how hard it would be to get right.

I was able to pose the ties by stringing them over an apparatus made from a rabbit-ear-style TV antenna and wire clothing hangers. Then, I "painted out" the low-tech apparatus that I created.

Example #4: Building a Virtual Space

This photograph (technically, it's a composite of many photographs) is another page from Debonair Magazine. I originally planned to photograph these products inside of a real medicine cabinet, but that turned out to be a bust. Medicine cabinets are either mirrored or lined with unsightly plastic.

Ultimately, I found a piece of scrap metal at the curb and brushed it with scouring pads to give it a texture. Then, I photographed each product separately against a white background and blended the photos together in Photoshop. The end result isn't photorealistic, but it was decent enough.