The NewYorker wrote a great article about Pascal Dangin owner of the Box Studios. The Box Studio is THE retouching studio, based in NewYork meatpacking district, The Box is working for every single fashion campaign and Magazine – In the world of photo retouching Pascal is a rock star. He is what’s referred to as a “Master Retoucher” – the best there is – and is working with such famed photographers as Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Patrick Demarchelier and Craig McDean amongst others…
He brings photo retouching to a higher level – almost giving images an artistic quality - and should not be confused with those who hack apart images for certain magazine covers….
Image via Times.com
Here’s a brief snippet from a recent article in the New Yorker on Dangin…
The obvious way to characterize Dangin, as a human Oxy pad, is a reductive one—any art student with a Mac can wipe out a zit. His success lies, rather, in his ability to marry technical prowess to an aesthetic sensibility: his clients are paying for his eye, and his mind, as much as for his hand. Those who work with Dangin describe him as a sort of photo whisperer, able to coax possibilities, palettes, and shadings out of pictures that even the person who shot them may not have imagined possible. To construct Annie Leibovitz’s elaborate tableaux—the “Sopranos” ads, for example—he takes apart dozens of separate pictures and puts them back together so that the seams don’t show. (Misaligned windows are a particular peeve.) He has been known to work for days tinting a field of grass what he considers the most expressive shade of green. “Most green grass that has been electronically enhanced, you know, you look at it and you get a headache,” Dangin said recently. He prefers a muted hue—“much redder, almost brown in a way”—that is meant to recall the multilayered green of Kodachrome film.
Recommended articles on Pascal Dangin: The Age | New Yorker | Time Magazine | New York Times
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_collins?currentPage=all
