Help with terminology please

[Damo77]

I’m beginning to rebuild my portfolio website (which I shall submit for your ruthless criticism in due course). Apart from the challenges of teaching myself Flash, I’ve encountered another problem – I don’t exactly know how to describe my work.

In the past, I’ve loosely referred to my work as “enhancement and retouching” of photos, without really elaborating. I’d like to explain it a bit better, so I need clarification of these terms.

In my mind, “Enhancement” refers to general contrast, exposure and colour corrections – ie, improving on the original photo.

Whereas I took “Retouching” to refer to changing a photo in some way – most commonly improving skin flaws, for example. Obviously, I would “enhance” a photo first, before moving on to “retouching” it.

Really major work would perhaps be referred to as “Compositing”, where two or more photos are combined, etc.

Can anyone tell me if they agree with my definitions? Is there actually a standard for this? Dictionary.com seemed to agree with me (hard to tell), and Wikipedia wasn’t much help at all.

[Mike]

When I talk to portrait customers, we always "enhance" the image, "retouching" implies that there is something wrong with either them or our photography.