Retouching as commodity

This is for anyone who thinks their skill in commercial art - or any other executional discipline - will keep them happily employed for the rest of time:

Pixilu.com cleans up your digital photos for anywhere from $1.49 to $9.99.

Thanks, Guy:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/reality-check-p.html

“Hold on to your tips n’ tricks long enough, and someone will make a button out of them”
-- Kai Krause

The clock is ticking...

It's only a matter of time before the disciplines of digital imaging, page makeup, color management, and all the other things that separate a thriving studio from a garage operation become freely accessible services, at an acceptable level of quality for commercial work.
At that point, the competitive strategy of agency studios needs to shift if studios are to survive.

Remember what happened to typesetting? Type is now free, and you can't make a living as a typesetter any more - that task is being done in stealth mode, by people who are getting paid to do something else (like layout or retouching).
Is it as good as professional type shops used to deliver? Of course not. But the market voted with its dollars - computer typography is good enough, and Nearly Free beats $35/foot (plus paste-up!) any day.

So all of us who rely on execution to pay our bills need to keep moving further upstream, closer to the creative process - managing, selecting and otherwise caring for images, for example, rather than fussing with them as the computers can do faster and cheaper.
We humans are good at judgement, contextualization, the subtleties of style; machines are better at speed and accuracy. Let's stop competing with them and focus on what our strengths are.