A Practical Guide to Outsourcing Retouching
Sending retouching work to external studios or freelancers.
Imogen Clarke
Where most projects go wrong
The usual mistakes:
- Verbal briefs for outsourced work
- Volume commitments before testing
- Unreleased products sent without agreements
- Batches accepted without checks
What good looks like instead
- Provide a written retouching style guide
- Run a paid test batch first
- Agree confidentiality for unreleased products
- Define review and rework processes
- Check samples from every batch
Why it matters
Outsourcing scales capacity, but quality varies and standards must be explicit.
The specs that matter
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Standards | written style guides are essential |
| Test batches | reveal quality before volume commitments |
| Data | images may contain confidential product information |
| Turnaround | time zones affect review cycles |
Knowing when to hand it over
Tip: Bring in help when retouching volume exceeds capacity.
Where this comes from
- Adobe Help Center — Photoshop User Guide
- IPTC — Photo Metadata Standard
The figures and practices above come from the sources listed.
Working on something like this?
We take on Image Editing & Retouching work for teams who want it done once, properly. Tell us what you are building and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right studio for it. Start a project.
Where to go next
Spotted something wrong? Report an error on this page. We correct on the page and say what changed.
