The demise of Retouching Services. Did off-shore Prepress kill it?
A little History
Over the last 10-15 years many prepress houses and retouchers have disappeared and for many reasons. Photoshop continues to get easier to use, high end drum scanners, image setters, and plate-makers are no longer part of most workflows, digital automation and direct to plate, digital photography and simpler tools such as digital asset management DAM have all added to the demise of many wonderful businesses and talented staff.
Like typesetters a few years ago whose ability to turn text and pages into art the craft is all but dead and moved into the realm of several narrower fields and industries.
Many customers of the once great prepress and graphic arts houses are now doing the work in house with far less people and often with far worse quality. Some might argue this point as we often want to think our investment or newly acquired skills are "good enough" but much has been lost in the art of typesetting and print has not looked nearly as good in years even as the desktop publishing revolution is a distant memory.
InDesign, Quark, PageMaker, ReadySetGo, FrameMaker and others have all replaced the once mighty and very expensive typesetter but the skills are often overlooked or forgotten. Even as many who have grown up with desktop publishing have learned to love typography and studied it, they are often left with no time or budget to do it justice, good enough is the new norm.
There are countless discussions online among photographers about the demise of fine photography, about the part time house wives and uncles with semi-professional cameras, a copy of photoshop and poor retouching skills killing the professional wedding market and portraits. Middle income people and others place much less value on archival grade works of art, while the wealthy continue to spend and value family and personal portraits, high end wedding photography and even in commercial and advertising photography has been hit hard.
Digital Revolution Hurting Many
Catalog companies, manufacturers and businesses have all tightened budgets to a point of driving many photographers out of work, large studios that used to thrive on furniture sets, automobiles and Madison Avenue projects have disappeared. And the many graphic arts service bureau's, prepress, and retouching shops have also disappeared.
Many photographers learned to their surprise that when they went digital they also had to take on the rolls of retoucher, archivist, librarian, color theorist, and imaging output. Instead of spending most of their time behind the camera many have had to stop shooting and move behind a monitor. SOme love it some hate it but for virtually all professional photographers they too bare some responsibility for the demise of retouching and prepress service bureaus.
As mentioned above some have gone in-house, many have very competent staff and utilize highly skilled freelance. While others have taken work from these creative professions and given them over to secretaries, interns, and administrative assistants with a copy of MS Word.
Sometimes it's an issue with management who for a variety of reasons have slashed costs and that included the marketing staff and art directors who understood the value of professionally crafted copy, images, and graphic design. Some have shifted to the internet which is another discussion altogether, often a dumbing down of the quality and effectiveness has happened and we all see it's effects on the quality of advertising, TV commercials, display and outdoor signage, and other areas.
Our appetite for digital content has driven us to using photos of life's important events to be captured with crappy camera phones, sent to FaceBook or other social media and quickly forgotten. And all this has driven the demise of another large industry most people know little about. We live at 140 characters at a time.
I used to work with a company called Graphic Arts Services or GAS in Georgia, they had full blown photo studios, in-house retouching, compositing, and typesetting, they did file conversions, color management, swatch matching, page impositions and graphic design. In the heyday they had hundreds of talented employees and were well respected with printers, catalogs, packaged goods, magazine publishers and fine art publishers too. Now they are reduced to 2 or 3 employees and a few jobs in a tiny niche' shop.
Their demise came about for many reasons but one sore point to this day can get even the nicest people really ticked off, and cause North and South or Hatfield and McCoy feuds when the subject is brought up, it's highly political driving discussions about patriotism, unions, social welfare, slave wages and more. It is called off-shore retouching and prepress.
Is Off-Shore Retouching Totally to Blame?
Despite the issues above and the global economic recession some people look to blame someone or just one thing for all the changes that effect them. In retouching and prepress that is off shoring and the hate is often directed squarely at India.
With the advent of broadband internet cheap communications and digital imaging, prepress and retouching has followed manufacturing to India and elsewhere in an effort to drive down labor costs.
India, Russia, Poland, Ukraine and elsewhere have all seen the rise of prepress or retouching houses with hundreds of around the clock, highly skilled retouchers, automated workflows, and extremely fast turnaround wrapped up in low prices. And for many US and European printers, advertisers, catalogs, retailers, and photographers using these services has allowed them to cut costs in a huge way and more importantly to survive. But at what cost?
How much are they really saving?
Try 10s of millions a year for many retailers. Imagine a large cataloger like Sears, Cabela's, Restoration Hardware, or Speigels, each with dozens of catalogs, each with thousands of new products each year to be photographed and then worked on my prepress retouchers.
Having worked in the catalog department of more than a few retailers and direct mail businesses I can tell you most people have no idea the amount of photography that happens. Products are shot as still life, in environmental situations or action shots, from many angles and styles, shot with a variety of models and propping, and changes to lighting. Some studios shoot products hundreds of times.
In the recent past all those shots would go through many rounds of editing down, basic color correction and retouching would be done to each image, proof prints were made, art directors, merchants, graphic artists, product managers and stylists would make corrections to the shots to be shot again before creative directors, editors and management got their rounds of selections and editing.
Each round meant another pass at refining the retouching, removing dust, correcting body flaws, adding hair, removing hair, changing skin tones, creating sizzle and enticement etc. Products still being designed go though variations from marketing and design so art directors, photo editors, compositing, graphic designers and retouchers all would go through round after round as the work is refined, and edited. A shot you see in a catalog, or a pretty face on the cover of a magazine could have been touched by dozens of people originating form hundreds of shots, every version stored on multiple servers and databases, and manipulated in many ways. All this costs, and it costs a lot!
Lets look at a workflow for a single photo shoot for a single product just 5 years ago, in a tight workflow their could have been as many as 5 but sometimes ten proofs on highly calibrated digital or analog proof printers, prints that could cost up to $100 a piece in some markets, retouchers and photoshop experts making $50,000 to $100,000 a year or more did the work, some of which could take many hours or even weeks. Often produced out of house and requiring curriers or days of back and forth via FedX.
One example is a clothing photo shoot I worked on with 7 male models who were instructed to all have a weeks worth of facial hair for the shoot. This was an entire catalog of mens clothing for a new fall season shot on location in another country at great expense.
After the shoot was done and editing had begun and gone through several rounds, and designers had begun page layouts management finally sees it's first round and wants all the facial hair removed! Leaving two choices, reshoot and entire catalog, rehire the models if available, stylists, support staff, location rental payments, travel expenses, caterers, and other staff or do it with the masters of retouching who we had on staff. The 12 staff experts spent three weeks shaving the models for this high end customer at great expense setting aside many other jobs that had to be outsourced to neighboring shops. But it was still less expensive that a reshoot.
The costs when done were still in the 10s of thousands of dollars. Something no bean counter worth his or her salt would tolerate again. So the next time something like this happened for this retailer they took the work offshore to India. Costs? $2.50 per image for retouching, spotting, color re-correction and another $1.00 per image for advanced retouching like facial hair removal or to change out jewelry and props. Three rounds were included at this price.
A job that could costs thousands of dollars per image suddenly could cost a few dollars, be done in a quarter of the time, and they could handle as much volume as we asked of them without delay.
Say goodbye to the prepress department forever.
Was the work as good? No. Were there issues with distance, time zones, communications, slang, jargon, and even work ethics? Yes. Does management care when all they really focus on is the costs and time to delIvery? No. Is it shortsighted? Debatable.
And hence the fall of prepress, retouching and graphic art services in America and much of Europe. Are they all gone? No for the few high end catalogs and advertisers and fine art book makers, and archival press houses their remains a handful of high end retouching services. The rest have scattered to in-house shops, at half the pay, to printers, and to other professions.
But is it the offshore companies fault? Should we hate them for the good paying high wages their employees earn in comfortable color managed digital darkrooms? The answers are not so easy. It's sad to see these powerhouses of artistic craftsmanship go away just as it was with typesetters, and is happening now to photographers many of whom have also been doing prepress and retouching work since they went digital taking away from other businesses even as they see they're own professions devastated by change.
Taking our work to India
Although I have yet to find a US company that can match the off shore prices I still go to the local retouchers and prepress houses first.
There are certain advantages:
They are open when I am awake, so I can talk to them when I need to.
I can get face to face time when I want it.
I can have hands-on editing and retouching when I want to stay close to the work.
They often offer other services that the off-shore accounts don't which make up for the other costs.
They don't have odd or extended holidays like many off-shore retouchers do.
There is a lot that can be said for the local relationship, the value they can add, the clearer communications and other services that can offset retouching costs.
That said, there are still times when I have turned to off-shoring work when that was my only choice. The quality is good and fast if I can keep instructions straight forward and simple. Sometimes saving the money on retouching means I can save another persons job by moving those funds to salaries or reassigning them to other work. Some of my clients or employers may demand the lower cost, and sometimes it's the only way to get a job done in time and on budget.
I may not like it but creative life is changing and requires fiscally wise choices sometimes you have to choose the best of the bad choices.
Often people who do not employ others or have larger P&L responsibilities do not understand the complexities of these choices. It's not always as simple as saving someone's retouching job, sometimes the cost would mean many more contracts and jobs lost or loosing the company altogether.
It's a tough world and the choices are not always easy or as simple as we would think or wish them to be.
Over the last 10-15 years many prepress houses and retouchers have disappeared and for many reasons. Photoshop continues to get easier to use, high end drum scanners, image setters, and plate-makers are no longer part of most workflows, digital automation and direct to plate, digital photography and simpler tools such as digital asset management DAM have all added to the demise of many wonderful businesses and talented staff.
Like typesetters a few years ago whose ability to turn text and pages into art the craft is all but dead and moved into the realm of several narrower fields and industries.
Many customers of the once great prepress and graphic arts houses are now doing the work in house with far less people and often with far worse quality. Some might argue this point as we often want to think our investment or newly acquired skills are "good enough" but much has been lost in the art of typesetting and print has not looked nearly as good in years even as the desktop publishing revolution is a distant memory.
InDesign, Quark, PageMaker, ReadySetGo, FrameMaker and others have all replaced the once mighty and very expensive typesetter but the skills are often overlooked or forgotten. Even as many who have grown up with desktop publishing have learned to love typography and studied it, they are often left with no time or budget to do it justice, good enough is the new norm.
There are countless discussions online among photographers about the demise of fine photography, about the part time house wives and uncles with semi-professional cameras, a copy of photoshop and poor retouching skills killing the professional wedding market and portraits. Middle income people and others place much less value on archival grade works of art, while the wealthy continue to spend and value family and personal portraits, high end wedding photography and even in commercial and advertising photography has been hit hard.
Digital Revolution Hurting Many
Catalog companies, manufacturers and businesses have all tightened budgets to a point of driving many photographers out of work, large studios that used to thrive on furniture sets, automobiles and Madison Avenue projects have disappeared. And the many graphic arts service bureau's, prepress, and retouching shops have also disappeared.
Many photographers learned to their surprise that when they went digital they also had to take on the rolls of retoucher, archivist, librarian, color theorist, and imaging output. Instead of spending most of their time behind the camera many have had to stop shooting and move behind a monitor. SOme love it some hate it but for virtually all professional photographers they too bare some responsibility for the demise of retouching and prepress service bureaus.
As mentioned above some have gone in-house, many have very competent staff and utilize highly skilled freelance. While others have taken work from these creative professions and given them over to secretaries, interns, and administrative assistants with a copy of MS Word.
Sometimes it's an issue with management who for a variety of reasons have slashed costs and that included the marketing staff and art directors who understood the value of professionally crafted copy, images, and graphic design. Some have shifted to the internet which is another discussion altogether, often a dumbing down of the quality and effectiveness has happened and we all see it's effects on the quality of advertising, TV commercials, display and outdoor signage, and other areas.
Our appetite for digital content has driven us to using photos of life's important events to be captured with crappy camera phones, sent to FaceBook or other social media and quickly forgotten. And all this has driven the demise of another large industry most people know little about. We live at 140 characters at a time.
I used to work with a company called Graphic Arts Services or GAS in Georgia, they had full blown photo studios, in-house retouching, compositing, and typesetting, they did file conversions, color management, swatch matching, page impositions and graphic design. In the heyday they had hundreds of talented employees and were well respected with printers, catalogs, packaged goods, magazine publishers and fine art publishers too. Now they are reduced to 2 or 3 employees and a few jobs in a tiny niche' shop.
Their demise came about for many reasons but one sore point to this day can get even the nicest people really ticked off, and cause North and South or Hatfield and McCoy feuds when the subject is brought up, it's highly political driving discussions about patriotism, unions, social welfare, slave wages and more. It is called off-shore retouching and prepress.
Is Off-Shore Retouching Totally to Blame?
Despite the issues above and the global economic recession some people look to blame someone or just one thing for all the changes that effect them. In retouching and prepress that is off shoring and the hate is often directed squarely at India.
With the advent of broadband internet cheap communications and digital imaging, prepress and retouching has followed manufacturing to India and elsewhere in an effort to drive down labor costs.
India, Russia, Poland, Ukraine and elsewhere have all seen the rise of prepress or retouching houses with hundreds of around the clock, highly skilled retouchers, automated workflows, and extremely fast turnaround wrapped up in low prices. And for many US and European printers, advertisers, catalogs, retailers, and photographers using these services has allowed them to cut costs in a huge way and more importantly to survive. But at what cost?
How much are they really saving?
Try 10s of millions a year for many retailers. Imagine a large cataloger like Sears, Cabela's, Restoration Hardware, or Speigels, each with dozens of catalogs, each with thousands of new products each year to be photographed and then worked on my prepress retouchers.
Having worked in the catalog department of more than a few retailers and direct mail businesses I can tell you most people have no idea the amount of photography that happens. Products are shot as still life, in environmental situations or action shots, from many angles and styles, shot with a variety of models and propping, and changes to lighting. Some studios shoot products hundreds of times.
In the recent past all those shots would go through many rounds of editing down, basic color correction and retouching would be done to each image, proof prints were made, art directors, merchants, graphic artists, product managers and stylists would make corrections to the shots to be shot again before creative directors, editors and management got their rounds of selections and editing.
Each round meant another pass at refining the retouching, removing dust, correcting body flaws, adding hair, removing hair, changing skin tones, creating sizzle and enticement etc. Products still being designed go though variations from marketing and design so art directors, photo editors, compositing, graphic designers and retouchers all would go through round after round as the work is refined, and edited. A shot you see in a catalog, or a pretty face on the cover of a magazine could have been touched by dozens of people originating form hundreds of shots, every version stored on multiple servers and databases, and manipulated in many ways. All this costs, and it costs a lot!
Lets look at a workflow for a single photo shoot for a single product just 5 years ago, in a tight workflow their could have been as many as 5 but sometimes ten proofs on highly calibrated digital or analog proof printers, prints that could cost up to $100 a piece in some markets, retouchers and photoshop experts making $50,000 to $100,000 a year or more did the work, some of which could take many hours or even weeks. Often produced out of house and requiring curriers or days of back and forth via FedX.
One example is a clothing photo shoot I worked on with 7 male models who were instructed to all have a weeks worth of facial hair for the shoot. This was an entire catalog of mens clothing for a new fall season shot on location in another country at great expense.
After the shoot was done and editing had begun and gone through several rounds, and designers had begun page layouts management finally sees it's first round and wants all the facial hair removed! Leaving two choices, reshoot and entire catalog, rehire the models if available, stylists, support staff, location rental payments, travel expenses, caterers, and other staff or do it with the masters of retouching who we had on staff. The 12 staff experts spent three weeks shaving the models for this high end customer at great expense setting aside many other jobs that had to be outsourced to neighboring shops. But it was still less expensive that a reshoot.
The costs when done were still in the 10s of thousands of dollars. Something no bean counter worth his or her salt would tolerate again. So the next time something like this happened for this retailer they took the work offshore to India. Costs? $2.50 per image for retouching, spotting, color re-correction and another $1.00 per image for advanced retouching like facial hair removal or to change out jewelry and props. Three rounds were included at this price.
A job that could costs thousands of dollars per image suddenly could cost a few dollars, be done in a quarter of the time, and they could handle as much volume as we asked of them without delay.
Say goodbye to the prepress department forever.
Was the work as good? No. Were there issues with distance, time zones, communications, slang, jargon, and even work ethics? Yes. Does management care when all they really focus on is the costs and time to delIvery? No. Is it shortsighted? Debatable.
And hence the fall of prepress, retouching and graphic art services in America and much of Europe. Are they all gone? No for the few high end catalogs and advertisers and fine art book makers, and archival press houses their remains a handful of high end retouching services. The rest have scattered to in-house shops, at half the pay, to printers, and to other professions.
But is it the offshore companies fault? Should we hate them for the good paying high wages their employees earn in comfortable color managed digital darkrooms? The answers are not so easy. It's sad to see these powerhouses of artistic craftsmanship go away just as it was with typesetters, and is happening now to photographers many of whom have also been doing prepress and retouching work since they went digital taking away from other businesses even as they see they're own professions devastated by change.
Taking our work to India
Although I have yet to find a US company that can match the off shore prices I still go to the local retouchers and prepress houses first.
There are certain advantages:
They are open when I am awake, so I can talk to them when I need to.
I can get face to face time when I want it.
I can have hands-on editing and retouching when I want to stay close to the work.
They often offer other services that the off-shore accounts don't which make up for the other costs.
They don't have odd or extended holidays like many off-shore retouchers do.
There is a lot that can be said for the local relationship, the value they can add, the clearer communications and other services that can offset retouching costs.
That said, there are still times when I have turned to off-shoring work when that was my only choice. The quality is good and fast if I can keep instructions straight forward and simple. Sometimes saving the money on retouching means I can save another persons job by moving those funds to salaries or reassigning them to other work. Some of my clients or employers may demand the lower cost, and sometimes it's the only way to get a job done in time and on budget.
I may not like it but creative life is changing and requires fiscally wise choices sometimes you have to choose the best of the bad choices.
Often people who do not employ others or have larger P&L responsibilities do not understand the complexities of these choices. It's not always as simple as saving someone's retouching job, sometimes the cost would mean many more contracts and jobs lost or loosing the company altogether.
It's a tough world and the choices are not always easy or as simple as we would think or wish them to be.
Comments