Retouching is what you do only when your original images are in trouble from the start:

The great misconception of the masses is that it doesn't matter how poorly the picture comes out of the camera because it can be fixed in PhotoShop. Of course this is not a professional photographer's understanding, but rather a whimsical conception conceived by millions of happy snappers with smart phone cameras.

When it comes to professional photography, the image from the camera must be at least 90% right otherwise the rest of the day is spent fixing a bad image. There's no profit in that, not for the pro, and not for anyone else who has more to do in the day than fumble through a foreign process only to end up with a failed image.

Simple logic: Garbage in = Garbage out.

When it comes to professional product and jewelry photography where the Point of Sale Image must be against a pure white background, even the best studio pros are challenged as they can at best get 70% out of the camera. That leaves 30% that has to be cleaned up, and that 30% might as well be 100% because the effort of using traditional techniques to turn a non-pure-white background into pure white requires one of two tasks; use a paintbrush to paint around every edge of the image object and then fill in the open fields, or use a pen tool to precisely trace around every detail of the image edges and then select and separate the image from the dirty background and then replace that by layering in a pure white background behind it. In either case you're in for a very long day.

Now there are those Sellers of light boxes and table top gizmos who tell you that all you have to do is use Brightness and Contrast to fix the dirty background. What they don't tell you is that by following the Brightness-Contrast method the image gets eaten away, the edges disappear, and in the case of shiny objects such as jewelry and most other products, so too then do the details of the image get lost. In other words, you lose.

Up to this point you're probably shaking your head because the two things people tell you about this type of photography are either too expensive in time, or just plain fraudulent. We understand, after all we made the journey long before you and went a lot further than you will ever go along that road. As the owner operator of a professional photography studio specializing in product and jewelry, it was all too common to take pictures for an hour and then spend the rest of the day in front of a glaring computer cleaning images up to a pure white background; it was beyond tedious, beyond fatiguing, it was sucking the marrow out of my life.

To compound the difficulties, it was next to impossible to get images where aside from the off colored undesired background, there were not also other flaws in the image such as unwanted contrast on metallics, lost details in stones, and so on, all of which had to be dealt with by employing high level painstaking time consuming skills. And... I'm only glancing the surface of what is involved in traditional professional studio methods for photographing jewelry and products.

There is a revolutionary new way:

Now anyone can produce Do-It-Yourself high-end professional images of jewelry and products against a pure white background in on average of only three minutes. Anyone can achieve this is with one of PhotoCubics' Professional Flash Powered Desktop Photo Studio Systems. It took years to refine the ins and outs so that anyone, even those with no prior photography experience, can do it. Today it is real and available from PhotoCubics Inc.

With PhotoCubics 90% of the image is "right" straight out of the camera. No more cleaning up dingy backgrounds, no more clipping paths, no more ugly unwanted contrast, no more retouching. Just take the picture and then with a few enhancement steps it is a world-class image. Three minutes.