Professional Photo Retouching — Commercial, Editorial & Advertising
With over 25 years of professional experience, I provide photo retouching and post-production services for commercial photographers, advertising agencies, and brands — from single-image refinements to full campaign production.
My retouching background is rooted in some of the most technically demanding editorial work in the industry. At Meredith Corporation, I was the primary retoucher for Better Homes & Gardens — one of the highest-circulation magazines in the United States — where the bulk of my work was architecture and interiors photography. That discipline demands a particular kind of precision: walls, trim, cabinetry, and textiles all carry color that must read consistently across a four-, six-, or eight-page spread, often shot across multiple days under different lighting conditions. My job was to make every image feel like it belonged in the same room. Color grading and cross-image color balancing were the core of the work, not an afterthought.
Alongside the interiors work, I handled complex compositing — building final images from multiple exposures, replacing skies and windows, correcting architectural distortion, and integrating product into environmental photography seamlessly. That compositing background extends to advertising work: as part of a retouching team for Coca-Cola, I composited CGI product renders into lifestyle photography, a process that requires an exacting command of light direction, shadow behavior, color temperature, and depth to make a rendered object convincingly inhabit a real photograph.
Specialties include:
- Architecture and interiors retouching
- Color grading and cross-image color consistency across multi-page spreads and campaigns
- Complex compositing — multi-exposure, CGI integration, environmental
- Commercial and product retouching
- Fashion and e-commerce retouching
- Skin and beauty retouching
I work non-destructively in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Capture One, and deliver to your specifications — whether that’s web, print, or social. Remote collaboration welcome.
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How_I_Work2 from Brian Frank on Vimeo.
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The day before a scheduled photoshoot for the Illinois Travel Guide summer issue, Six Flags amusement park decorated their signature entrance for Halloween. This was quite the shock for the art director, photographer, and models that arrived for a shoot that was supposed to showcase summer fun. Since everyone had traveled to the location and was on the clock, the photoshoot when forward as best it could.
I still remember the opening line of the email reading, “We have a little challenge for you.” Always loving a fresh challenge, I took a look and laughed out loud. This wasn’t just a challenge, but a test of all my retouching and problem-solving skills.
The first step would be to plan the attack. Retouching always takes some mental planning, but that is usually something that can be done in the back of your mind on-the-fly. With this situation, I needed to spend some time t think out all that needed to be done. Additionally, think about how to work in a manner that would allow for adjustments to be made later.
First, I needed to replace the water. I was able to use bits of a scouting shoot for the park since the water didn’t need to be the focal point, and the scouting images were shot at about the same angle and had the right amount of ripples and waves. Next, I needed to recreate the merry-go-round structure, bushes, and pool edges. Then cloned out signage, extended the background to the left and right to fit the magazine cover layout, and clean up the sidewalk, followed by adding some sky. Finally, I did some color correcting to brighten and warm the image, adjusted skin tones, and smoothed out some clothing.
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