Retouching, it’s an opportunity to retake the perfect picture while accepting that perfection is subjective.  As a designer I relish opportunities to develop an unencumbered dialogue between a subject and its audience. Retouching however is an attempt to constantly appeal to the sensibilities of the broadest possible audience, even the unwitting.  It’s a chance to influence perception in a way that heightens audience experience, enriching their appreciation of products and ideas.  Of course there are those instances that are strictly concerned with the constraints of photographic pre-production and production. But even these are an ambitious pursuit of evolution: the acceptance of more humble beginnings endeavoring to reach its zenith. I was once asked, ironically by a psychologist, if I agreed that retouching was dishonest.  My abbreviated reply was that I didn’t, much in the same way that being clothed rather than naked in public wasn’t dishonest.  Public decency is both social convention and individual expression, they are versions of choice not deceit.