Duggal CORPORATE OFFICE 10 West 24th Street New York, NY 10010 Phone: (212) 924-8100 RETAIL STORE 11 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 Phone: (212) 242-7000, ext. 311 www.duggal.com	HOURLY RATES: $150/hour for dropped-off projects, $250/hour for an appointment with an artist PRIMARY EQUIPMENT: Highest-end Macs—G6s, latest versions of Photoshop and more. These days, difference between retouching studios “comes down to talent...and having output devices that people will go to finals with.”	SPEED OF TURNAROUND: One to two days CONTACT FOR RETOUCHING SERVICES: Chhaya Bhatti, sales associate, (646) 638-7030 OTHER PRINCIPALS: Mike Duggal, COO Baldev Duggal, president and founder Bob Serpe, head retoucher

DUGGAL

Founded in 1961 as a film processing lab, Duggal is now a “concept-to-creation” services company boasting $15 million in digital equipment for such tasks as 16-foot-wide output, digital C-prints, digital slides and retouching. The Manhattan studio occupies both a one-city-block-deep, 30,000-square-foot space at 10 West 24th Street and a retail store around the corner at 11 West 20th Street.

Duggal first established itself as a retouching leader when it invested a couple million dollars to buy two Shima Seiki Paintboxes in 1990. The studio still owns those machines, but they get little use; today the studio’s four full-time retouching artists utilize a Mac-based, Photoshop-imbedded studio. Chief operating officer Mike Duggal says the studio’s highest-profile corporate clients for retouching include Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Victoria’s Secret and The New York Times archives. Recently, they also worked on a big exhibition for the British photographer Rankin.

The studio also has long-standing relationships with pro photographers. For Bert Stern, Duggal recently retouched and restored some slides of Marilyn Monroe that he had originally processed at Duggal back in the Sixties.

For Joel Meyerowitz, Duggal has been working for years on his periodic images of the World Trade Center shot from his former 12th-floor studio on 19th Street. After the tragedy there, the lab worked intensively with Meyerowitz for months on old and new images of the site, including the creation of composite images conveying the scope of the destruction, which were sent by the U.S. State Department to foreign governments.

But retouching manager Bob Serpe says the most common retouching job Duggal handles is photo compositing, where the challenge is to combine elements from different environments in a way that the viewer can’t tell the image has been retouched.

One good example of the more bread-and-butter work Duggal tends to do is a job with Latina magazine. The brief was to produce a composite image for one of its covers. The image was shot by Albert Sanchez, the celebrity shooter who in the past has photographed stars such as Johnny Depp, Bryan Ferry and Drew Barrymore. Serpe’s instructions from the creative director was to take one image featuring a woman sitting on a couch and a man standing behind her, and add to it the image of a second man who had been photographed in a separate shoot.

The second man had been shot sitting on a ladder; Serpe placed him so it looked like he was sitting on the back of the couch. He then added the man’s shadow on the couch and warped the couch to make it look like the man’s weight was compacting the cushion. He also created the man’s shadow on the wall behind.

He explains, “I had to make a mask for the shadow, blur the mask appropriately so the shadow he was casting wasn’t any sharper or different than that of the person in the shot originally. I was masking and color-correcting so it was just right.” Finally, Serpe added a popcorn bowl on the table, reflecting the bowl’s colors onto the leather couch. He polished the job with the usual cosmetic retouching—cleaning up faces by getting rid of crow’s feet, blood-shot eyes and the like.

While compositing projects may be the studio’s bread and butter, Serpe said the studio prides itself on more challenging projects involving complete photo restoration and massive color corrections for museums, archives, professional photographers and other clients. And the retouching department also receives a significant amount of work from amateur photographers, illustrators and the general public through its retail store, including restoration of old photographs.

Serpe says it’s actually simpler to retouch a professional commercial photograph of a bottle of perfume, which typically involves altering reflections or changing a color, than it is to restore an old photo where you have to eliminate tears in the paper. While some studios don’t accept restoration work, Serpe believes “making an old photograph look like new is really good practice for a retoucher. You’re using so many different methods.”

— John Courtmanche

Image by Albert Sanchez.