Well James, you hit the nail on the key point: MUA, Lightning etc... for the final look. In short, pre and prod so that the PP is just a sweet extention instead of being fixing sins. This is by far the most complicated and the people who have those skills are not legions. I guess, that in itself justifies the zeros on the bill.
A few weeks ago I had a funny conversation in Whatsapp (I hate whatsapp) with a big name of the fashion photography (he shooted many Hollywood stars and the best top models) and we were talking just about that. What made me laugh is that he calls the retouchers, "the MAC dudes", with a clear contemptuousness, pointing that as he gets older, the assistants are less and less skilled in the prod area because everybody thinks that "the MAC dudes" cure all crap, and ironicaly it does occur very often. But then, also in "the MAC dudes" terrain, the ones who have the skills to fix things for the high-end are not legions either and have a lot of zeros on their bills too. The MAC dudes is a good way to explain the situation.
Fred, your right.
I find that everyone we now shoot for has either grown up or become very use to the post production era, especially in stills. I don’t think a scene doesn’t go by where someone says “you can fix that in post . . . right?”
They believe and are right that anything can be done in post, but it has to be done by a very good team and it takes time.
Now that clients want motion, many times from the same project they think motion post is as simple as stills and will refer to some movie that looks organic but in reality has some green screen or matted portion in every scene.
What they don’t do is look at the credits and see the 300 post production artists, spread across three effects companies and 2 years of work.
We shot a video targeted for China where the scene was a family pulls up in a vehicle and gets out, goes into an airport. We took great pains in selecting a vehicle popular in China, changed the license plates, removed the vehicles logos except for one that could not be removed.
Their legal dept wanted the logos removed and same with any naming. I called my effects guy who is quite reasonable but they choked on the price, so I made stills of the areas, retouched them in PS, then tracked them. It took three long days, so there wasn’t any savings.
It’a interesting that when I go through the work I’m most proud of it was 99% organic with little post work, but today that’s very rare.
But yes, it's the mac dudes which is ok as long as I'm not the mac dude.
IMO
BC