Should You Or Should You Not?
Every retoucher or even creative will have to answer this question not only once but multiple times in their careers. Working for free or working for exposure?

In this episode, we will discuss if you should and what considerations you might want to incorporate into your decision-making process.
The Big Question: Should You Work For Exposure?
Whether to work for free, for exposure, or for any way of compensation might be a case by case decision, I am going to go through some options here and present you with some ideas along the way.

It might all come down to your business model, the clients you are after and the fields you decide to work in. At some point or another, you might be confronted with the decision to work for free or work for exposure.
Working For Free vs Working for Exposure
But is it really the same?

What does it mean to work for free and what does it mean to work for exposure? At first glance, it seems to be the same. One is working without compensation the other for a trade-in other than money and quite vague in terms of its values. And that is the thing! When how valuable is this exposure thing?
Is Exposure A New Currency?
It has become quite common for companies wanting to pay creatives to be paid in this magical thing called "exposure". But what can it mean to be paid in exposure? Is it at all comparable to the value of money? I am making a bold statement when I say: Yes, it can be as valuable as money. But hear me out, just and only just in a very few cases. While society is pretty much stable in evaluating the value of money, for exposure there is no way to easily measure or compare the benefits of the exposure-currency.

But what does that all mean for you as a retoucher? how can you make a decision on if a job for exposure could be worth it or if you rather should stay away from it?
A Retoucher's Catch-22 Situation
What is a catch-22 situation? For us retouchers it means, we have to work for our advertising material and in order to get good material, we have to have good work. But let me explain:

First, let's agree on the decision whether to work for exposure or not to be uniquely different from the decision a photographer has to make on this. While a photographer, who is working for free, on a TFP basis, or for exposure will always have the benefit of owning the copyrights to the images, a retoucher does not have such benefits. A retoucher can never own an image's copyright or by default has any other rights on the images he or she is working on.

So, the issue for us retouchers still is that we need images to promote ourselves, our businesses and our abilities. See it how you want but knowing we do not have any rights on images we have not taken ourselves I think and know, we have to either spend money on advertising or work for the right to use images.

There is no way around making an investment if you want to have a killer portfolio and want to get hired for the right jobs. Take this into consideration when making a decision whether you might want to work for free and to what terms.
The Risk Of Not Working For Money
Before making a decision though, I'd like to point out why you might not work for free or for exposure.

While working for free usually means just that, for free, no compensations, no terms,...working for exposure is just working under specific terms and being compensated by using an advertising platform. The key phrase here will be ROI, aka. what are your returns on the investment you put into a project?

As it really is hard to measure and to tell what the right exposure might be, there will always be a certain fear of being used and not getting anything out of a job to benefit long term. As we have discussed before,