The camera may not lie, but photographs handled by the new crop of digital enhancement artists can sometimes fib a little. Faces can have sleek new noses. Wrinkles can disappear. Eyelashes can be added along with more sharply defined waistlines. Double-chins can get faded to one. Tattoos, as well as a few pounds, can be subtracted, and entertainers—whether opera singers on a stage or a member of a string quartet—can be added or subtracted from an image.
Just ask Dan Demetriad, a New York-based photographer and expert in photo restoration and enhancement techniques. He is one of the top artists working today in the small, exclusive digital enhancement field. It’s not unusual for Demetriad to add hair, remove shadows, whiten teeth just a tad and minimize or expunge wrinkles. But Demetriad, classically trained in photographic restoration, has also been known, in a pinch, to change someone’s costume or insert new backdrops (or, in one case, move someone from off-stage to on). He’s even been known to add musicians to a photograph or remove a few, entirely.
Recently, Demetriad helped top New York portrait photographer Christian Steiner move conductor James Levine from front and center to side-stage. (See photo.) Demetriad has also worked with Steiner to enhance Steiner’s photographs of the Met’s production of Falstaff. Demetriad, partly using digital techniques, sharpened up the images to compensate for the bleaching effect of the overly harsh lights of the stage, a factor over which Steiner had no control during the photo shoot. The result? Tenor Bryn Terrell’s full-costume portrayal of Falstaff in the Met’s February production was rich in brown hues and, said Steiner, appeared as lushly-lit as if the photograph was shot in Steiner’s own studio. (See photo.)
The biggest beneficiaries of the enhancement work, though, are the artists themselves. Steiner recalls the time when the Anonymous Four a capella early music quartet lost one of its original members, Ruth Cunningham, who decided she wanted to pursue an independent career in music therapy. Irish soprano Jacqueline Horner was then hired to replace Cunningham, but suddenly, the group needed a new publicity photo. The quartet wanted Steiner to reshoot them all with Horner, but balked at the expense of flying everyone from California to New York—and they didn’t want to hire a different photographer. Instead, Steiner photographed Horner, who posed like Cunningham in the old group photo. He then took that photo of Horner, along with a copy of the old group shot of the quartet, to Demetriad, who worked out the rest. The result: A new photograph of the quartet that looks as if it had been wholly re-shot. “Dan simply removed Ms. Cunningham from the group photo and, with a little magic, inserted, in her place, Ms. Horner,” Steiner says. (See photo, page 13.) Adds Horner: “It still amazes me how he did this, because at that time, I’d not ever posed with the group for a photograph.”
It’s true, however, that digital tweaking, in some cases, can go too far. Controversy surrounding digital enhancements in recent years has spurred a debate over what’s acceptable retooling and fraud. For example, Newsweek magazine got into hot water some five years ago when editors darkened then murder suspect O.J. Simpson’s skin in a cover photograph to make him look more sinister. It was a move that unleashed a hailstorm of criticism in the journalism community and calls for widespread reforms and standards.
Demetriad and others will not accept work from customers if the requests for alteration raise copyright questions or seek to alter photographs that comprise historical records or official documentation. On the counter of his 57th Street studio in midtown Manhattan, Demetriad has posted a sign that reminds customers of his strict policies. His restoration clients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Art collection and the New York Athletic Club, which used Demetriad to restore the club’s extensive collection of vintage sports photographs. Demetriad applies the same standards to his entertainment works as he does to his work for museums.
Demetriad says the best enhancement artists have no temptation to go too far—and for good reason. In the entertainment field especially, artists have to look like themselves at their best, or they risk losing the part. “Just as nobody wants to have a bad facelift, nobody wants a photograph to be so retouched as to look unnatural,” he says. “I fail if some change I’ve made here or there is, in the last bit, obvious to someone else. This is an art of subtlety, not of exhibition.”
How is it done? The key isn’t just the computer. The best enhancers combine computers with classic, old-fashioned retouching, hand-tinting and enhancement techniques. Retouching, popularized in the early days of Hollywood, is routinely applied to advertisements and fashion photography. But lately, as digital technology evolves, more and more people in entertainment and other professions have felt the need to go the extra mile. “Simple head shots without enhancements simply don’t cut it anymore,” says Jeffrey Vanderveen, vice president of Columbia Artists in New York, which represents artists including Sam Ramey and Denyce Graves. The evolution of digital technology, Vanderveen says, “now requires high-resolution images and require more exacting production standards.” In the past, Vanderveen says, he’d get a headshot and send it right through to publicity department at Columbia. Now, he says, photographers deliver a portrait to Vanderveen’s people, and they hand it right over to a digital enhancement artist to take it up another notch, or two or three, before it goes any farther.
“Invariably,” Vanderveen says, “the photo I get from these artists has not been retouched well enough—especially if it’s a color photograph, because that’s harder to do.” Mass-market digital labs like Kinkos or Modern Age can only do so much, he says, as they don’t have artists on staff schooled in the rare art of retouching and restoration to combine with the new technologies of the digital age. “You can’t go to just anyone, or it’s going to end up looking totally contrived,” Vanderveen says.
Some new software programs, especially those produced for the Mac computers, offer any consumer with a digital camera and a little computer training the ability to, say, take the red out of a family snapshot or brighten up the teeth of their loved ones. But the art is still so new that only professionals schooled in the full range of photo restoration and digital techniques can offer the best results, Vanderveen says. Mattie Frye, a spokeswoman for Galowitz Photographics, a photo restoration shop in upstate New York that mostly deals with old photographs, compares digital enhancement techniques to frosting on a cake. “The cake is the classical work of restoration, which requires years of training and experience to get just right,” she says. “The frosting is this new digital aspect of it all, taking what you can do with restoration and moving it up a notch after that with digital techniques.”
Vanderveen says it’s not uncommon to get photographs from artists’ agents that accentuate the fact that a singer is wearing a hairpiece, “because the photo job has been so amateur.” The top enhancers, Vanderveen says, can fix other peoples’ mistakes. Case in point: a flier Demetriad designed and produced for Sam Ramey, along with a CD cover, involved both restoration and enhancement work—and digital tweaking. (See photo, page 15). “(Demetriad) can open someone’s eyes a little, get rid of someone’s wrinkles, add some eyelashes, fix bad lighting—in short, correct a photographer’s mistakes and an entertainer’s makeup no-no’s, like lip lines,” and have it done in 24 to 48 hours, Vanderveen says. “I’d say 70 or 80 percent of the photographs I see are in dire need of sending to a middleman first.”
How is it done? Demetriad, for one, believes the only way to enhance pictures properly is the old-fashioned way: by hand. For extensive restoration or retouching jobs, Demetriad does preliminary work in his darkroom. He mixes all of the chemicals that are used, a skill he brought with him from Romania, where he was born and worked in commercial photography. He then combines his 20-plus years of experience in hand-tinting, hand-processing, lighting and composition to his training in the use of computer software technology. And the combination hits the right chords, chiefly in the entertainment work he does. Sometimes it’s a question of scanning a photo print into a computer; other times, it’s necessary to make a new negative; sometimes it’s necessary to totally reconstruct a nose, paint in a cheekbone or minimize a bustline—or vice-versa—just a little. But rather than add flash and sizzle to images, Demetriad says his goal is to play to an artist’s visual strengths and keep everything as natural as possible.
In most cases, clients—if they’re local—have control over the outcome. For example, Demetriad often invites his customers to sit next to him while he works, so that they can watch what he’s doing, both to insure satisfaction and to see for themselves that it doesn’t often take big changes to make a huge difference in the mood or appearance of an artist in a photograph. Often, say, if he’s working to raise very slightly the arch of an eyebrow, he’ll enlarge that piece of the image on his computer to five or six times its original size, and apply digital restoration techniques from there, one eyebrow hair—or eyelash—at a time. “The process is extraordinary,” says Broadway, Hollywood and TV actor Tony Roberts, a Demetriad client. “It’s like when you have a facelift and nobody knows but you’re dying to tell someone. (Demetriad) can take lines out of your face in a second without having to scratch the negative.”
During a recent session with Roberts, Demetriad photographed Roberts, worked with him to select one of 40 images and then scanned it into the computer. Then Demetriad got busy applying his restoration techniques to the image, with Roberts sitting at his side, watching as Demetriad darkened his eyebrows a tad and opened his eyelids a bit wider. Roberts, who is winding down his run in “The Allergist’s Wife” on Broadway, said it’s important to keep updating one’s headshots. “A show can age you considerably,” he says. “It’s helpful to find someone who can do it all for you in one sitting, or who can get to know your face so well that they can actually help you age more gracefully, if you will, over time.” Roberts says the difference between enhancement artists can be night and day. For a more natural look, Roberts opts for Demetriad, who he says “can change features on people’s faces in subtle, indiscriminate ways that are totally natural.”
Roberts says such work doesn’t have to be expensive “You can spend $3,000 on a headshot or you can spend $100,” he says. “Everybody uses the same camera, the same background, the same general lighting. The real difference is a matter of how comfortable you are with the photographer. You can be very uncomfortable with somebody charging you $3,000 or very comfortable with someone charging you $250.” (See photo, page 24.)
Most enhancement artists don’t advertise, as there aren’t many of them, and those who are successful usually have built a loyal clientele of artists over the years. In New York, a city that has two button shops, two seashell shops and a dozen pet groomers, you might think there’d be a number of photographic restoration establishments—and at least a few dozen digital enhancement artists. Not so. Demetriad and Galowitz, for example, don’t advertise much in newspapers or magazines. Word of mouth has served them best over the years: their clients are only too happy to talk about their work.
And business has never been better, as it’s not just entertainers who use digital enhancement artists these days. Increasingly, it’s people seeking to have family snapshots and even heirloom portraits retouched or enhanced. Occasionally, the artists are asked to rewrite history. “Divorced men and women come in and ask me to take out pictures of their former spouses,” Demetriad says with a wry grin. Once, he said, a woman brought him a picture of herself posed in an evening gown on the deck of cruise ship. Her husband stood beside her. There were several others in the picture, including the captain of the ship. The woman wanted to replace her husband with the ship’s captain. Demetriad performed the surgery, grafting the captain, whose gaze was turned seaward, to the camera-struck woman’s arm.
In another recent case, a neighbor child was removed from a turn-of-the-century family portrait at a farmhouse. In yet another, a faded Polaroid color print was restored to its original hues and enhanced.”
Some of the pictures that come to Demetriad’s lab are very close to the last stages of deterioration. Sometimes, they have become glued to the glass of a frame because of poor mounting or they’ve spent so much time in an attic, they’re mildewed. Demetriad once restored a rare photograph of Maria Callas using his expertise in glass negatives and tintypes, which “most labs won’t do,” he says. The two media are survivors of photography’s infancy. Glass negatives often arrive in pieces. The broken shards are assembled on another piece of glass and then covered with a third glass sheet. The composite is then photographed. Tintypes, much less common than glass, are harder to work with, requiring special care. Due to the bitumen emulsion, which was spread on the tin, the recorded image is dark and has to be photographed at an angle using reflected light.
In the final stages of restoration, Demetriad mixes and matches the sepia color that is used in the original paper, or he’ll process the final negative for maximum true-to-color reproduction. “Any picture made in the 1950s and 1960s tends to use Kodak film or Polaroid negatives, and the people who made this film and sold it to consumers didn’t know it would fade, and so badly, especially the magenta layers of color,” Demetriad says. Recreating them in the lab can restore such colors.
Often, needed backgrounds, shadows, skin tones or noses, in some cases, can be drawn in by hand. Original negatives can be resurrected. One woman, for example, brought in a photograph of her grandmother that was so mildewed, it stuck to the glass in the frame. Demetriad carefully photographed the original print through the glass, and then enlarged the negative to what he calls a “second generation” print.
Demetriad and other digital enhancers can also remove damage to a negative from ink or, in the case of one woman, crayon that her child had used to draw all over a photograph of her mother. In one case, Demetriad says, a client who is a Yankee fan got so upset that his team lost the World Series one year, he put a bullet hole through a photograph of the team—through the jersey of the famed shortstop, Pee Wee Reese. Reese’s jersey was punctured by a hole the thickness of an index finger. Demetriad restored it, using airbrushing and copying the negatives.
Such digital face-lifting isn’t cheap. Prices can range from $90 per photograph to $350, depending on the quality of the original negative. “For about $100, give or take, you can have a complete photographic face lift,” says Demetriad. Galowitz’s prices run slightly higher and, being located in upstate New York away from the city, the bulk of his work is archival. Still, when it comes to digital enhancements, it’s not a bad alternative to the real thing. And in the right hands, when simple techniques aren’t enough, it can be a job-saver.
