In our visually saturated culture image manipulation is everywhere. Sometimes it's blatant, done for effect, deliberately in your face; other times it's as subtle as removing a blemish from someone else's face. Whichever end of the image intervention spectrum it's to be found, there's an undeniable artistry to doing it well. That's why specialist retouching services form a significant part of the business at Tapestry, one of London's top photographic and imaging services houses. Working for a who's who of top London advertising firms, including Labie Nairn, M&C Saatchi, Bartle Bogle Hegarty and WCRS, Tapestry's work winds up in big budget promotions for the likes of Texaco, the BBC and Channel 5.

Now part of the Mullis Morgan group of repro and associated services companies, Tapestry was founded as a rapid turnaround photolab and conventional retouching house.

Although traditional photographic services still play an important role at Tapestry's Soho premises, once you get past the light boxes and contact sheets on the ground floor, you're in a digital world. Large computer monitors glow softly in darkened rooms as highly skilled retouchers work the magic that their advertising clients demand of them.

Whether it's giving a fashion model the perfect skin or polishing the gloss on the latest executive saloon car, it's all done digitally. Raw images come in the form of 10 x 8 transparencies, prints or ready-scanned digital files; six retouchers are available during the day across staggered shifts and at least one late into the night, though as retouching manager Alex Stout says, "we'll work 24 hours if the job needs it."

Digital image retouching is nothing new. It's been going on for well over ten years. But what has changed recently at Tapestry is what they do it with. Until the summer of 1999, the Quantel Paintbox ruled supreme in Soho. With its combination of dedicated hardware and software it was able to offer a level of functionality and performance that met both the quality and productivity demands that Tapestry's clients expected.

Enter the young pretender
It was the expanding functionality of Adobe Photoshop, coupled with the increasing power of the Apple Macintosh that finally ended the reign of the Paintbox in Frith Street.

"It was Photoshop's layers that clinched it," says technical director Chris Bunnett. "The Paintbox could work in layers, but it couldn't save them, so you had to make a note of where everything was positioned. You also had to save stages along the way; with Photoshop we found we could save different stages on layers within the same file."

As any Photoshop user knows, there is a penalty for the flexibility and convenience of layers, and that's file size. But there can't be many who push the program as hard as the team at Tapestry:

"We had a Texaco job that was designed as a long strip for 48-sheet poster printing, with sections that were to be pulled out and used for individual posters," recalls Alex Stout. "We wound up with Photoshop at its maximum image size, 30 layers, most of which were images rather than adjustment layers, and a two gigabyte file. That was an exceptional job, but it's not uncommon to get a 1GB file these days."

To handle monster files like this, Tapestry uses top-of-the-range G4 Power Macintoshes, with the maximum RAM. "Our Macs are just Photoshop machines, we don't run much else on them," confirms Bunnett. Macs are the clear favourites in the retouching department - "Our operators prefer them, our clients have them, and we're looking forward to seeing how the new multiprocessor models help improve things like brush responsiveness," says Stout, whose own background involved conventional retouching, Paintbox and Paintbox 2 before moving to Photoshop. Photoshop is used on Windows PCs at Tapestry, in the new media department, where it's an essential tool for CD-ROM and Web work.

TV post-production work is another area that Tapestry is moving into, and it's because of this as much as new media that has led to the adoption of an RGB workflow within the image retouching facility. "We scan in RGB, work in RGB and output to transparency or Cromalin," explains Stout. "Most of the work ends up in print but we have the option to supply in RGB or CMYK. We've set up some good CMYK conversions for proofing. It's been very successful with clients and we're setting up profiles for different printing formats. We work to the Euroscale standard, so what we produce should be what they'll get."

Now that the high-end image manipulation work has been firmly shifted across to Photoshop, Chris Bunnett says the next stage for Tapestry is to more thoroughly investigate the creative side to the program. The company previously insisted on conventional or Paintbox experience for its new recruits, but since Photoshop proved itself a match for the dedicated system, that's beginning to change: "Our next move is to get digital artists in to see what's being done, to re-excite us about it," he says.

Tapestry can be contacted via its Web site at www.tapestrymm.com.