Every retouching studio on the internet can produce one excellent image. The portfolio proves it, and the portfolio is beside the point.
At catalogue scale the question is different, and duller than the one most vendor pages answer. It is not can they retouch a jacket. It is: will image 4,000 match image 1 when it was cut at three in the morning by a retoucher who never saw image 1, and will the batch land on the day it was promised in a week where three products arrived late from the shoot.
A portfolio cannot answer that. What follows is what we would ask if we were sitting on the buying side of the table. Some of these questions we answer well. One or two are uncomfortable for us. All eleven are worth asking of anyone, including us.
A typical vendor shortlist is built by comparing three things — portfolio, price per image, and stated turnaround. All three mislead at scale.
Portfolios are curated to the point of uselessness. Twelve images, chosen from years of work, retouched with unlimited time. Nobody publishes the file that came back with a soft edge on a Friday.
Price per image hides where the money actually goes. A quoted rate assumes a clean input file. Real shoots produce clamp marks, colour drift between racks, and garments that were steamed after the first eleven shots and not before. The revision round and the re-shoot are the real costs, and they never appear on a rate card. Our own breakdown of retouching rates covers what the ranges actually mean.
Turnaround claims describe the good week. Anyone can deliver in 24 hours on a Tuesday in February. The number that matters is what happens when your volume triples in September.
So ask about the machinery instead of the output.
There is nothing dishonest about a studio using partner capacity — most do, above a certain volume. What is dishonest is not saying so. A broker with a website and a WhatsApp group of freelancers can quote any capacity number it likes.
A weak answer: a single headcount with no breakdown, or “we have a large team of experienced retouchers”.
A good answer: a number for in-house staff, a separate number for contracted overflow, and a clear statement of what happens to a file that goes to overflow.
Peak is the whole point. Christmas, a rebrand, a new marketplace listing — volume is never flat, and a vendor sized exactly to your average is a vendor that will miss your peak.
A weak answer: “we can scale”. Everyone says this.
A good answer: how capacity is added, how long it takes, and whether the people added are hired or borrowed. Ask what the studio’s largest month actually was.
You are probably in a different timezone from your vendor. That is fine, and it is often the reason the work is affordable. It stops being fine when the only person who understands your brief is unavailable for nine hours of your working day.
A good answer: a named project manager, a named deputy, and a shift pattern you can look at.
This is the single most useful question on the list, and almost nobody asks it. A studio running around the clock with one QC lead has one person’s eye applied to a third of the output and nobody’s applied to the rest. Drift starts there, quietly, and you find it three weeks later when a customer complains that two colourways look like different products.
A good answer: more than one QC manager, explicitly assigned across shifts, checking against a written standard.
Not two beautiful images. Two ordinary ones from opposite ends of a shift. If a studio cannot produce this, it does not measure consistency, which means it does not manage it.
Ask directly, and ask for it in writing. Generative fill, AI background extension and one-click “AI retouching” are now inside a great many pipelines, often without the buyer being told.
There are two reasons to care. The first is compliance: several marketplaces and most brand guidelines now restrict AI-generated product imagery, and a jacket whose pocket was invented by a model is a returns problem. The second is quieter — if a vendor is feeding your unreleased season into a third-party AI service, your files have left the building.
A good answer: a written statement covering both generative editing inside the edit and whether your files are used to train anything.
If you are a European or UK brand, your images and their metadata leave the jurisdiction the moment you outsource. That is normal and lawful, and it is also something your legal team will ask about eventually. Better before the contract than during an audit.
A good answer: yes to your DPA rather than only their own, and a straight answer on Standard Contractual Clauses or the UK Addendum where they apply. Ours is set out on our security page.
Not where the company is registered — where the retouchers sit. A studio that is vague about this is usually vague because the answer is a country the buyer might flinch at, which is a poor reason to be vague. The production location is not the quality signal. The QC structure is.
Published rates are not a discount. They are a statement that the price does not depend on how the buyer sounds on a call. A vendor that will only quote after a discovery call is optimising the quote against you. Ours are on the pricing page.
Free samples select for people who collect free samples. At the volumes discussed here, a small free test also proves very little — five images retouched by the studio’s best person over an afternoon is not a sample of what 600 a day looks like.
A better structure: a paid test batch of fifty to a hundred files, run through the real pipeline, on the real shift pattern, at the real rate. It costs a little, it finishes quickly, and it tells you what you actually need to know.
Layered files, naming conventions, the colour profile, the written spec your brand was retouched against. A vendor that keeps the spec in one person’s head has made itself hard to leave, and that is a decision it made on your behalf.
We publish this list knowing we will be asked it. Our answers, plainly:
If you only ask three of these, ask about QC across shifts, ask for two frames from opposite ends of a run, and ask for the no-AI commitment in writing. Those three separate the studios that manage consistency from the ones that hope for it.
More on the production side of the same problem: nine product photography mistakes that raise your retouching bill, ghost mannequin vs flat lay vs on-model, clipping path vs background removal vs image masking, and the longer guide to choosing a retouching partner. If you are a studio or agency buying under your own name, our white-label service is built for that.
Tell us your monthly volume and your categories. We will answer every question on this list in writing, and tell you honestly whether we have the capacity before we discuss anything else.
Talk to the studioJudge the machinery rather than the portfolio. Ask how many retouchers are in-house versus subcontracted, how many QC managers there are and whether they are spread across shifts, whether any generative AI is used, and whether the studio will sign your DPA. A portfolio shows what a studio can do once. Those answers show what it does four thousand times.
The three most useful are: how many QC managers do you have and are they assigned across shifts; can you send two ordinary images from opposite ends of the same run, retouched eight hours apart; and will you put your no-AI position in writing.
For low volumes a free test edit is fine. Above roughly 20,000 images a month it proves very little, because five images retouched by the studio’s best retoucher over an afternoon is not a sample of what 600 a day looks like. A paid test batch of 50 to 100 files, run through the ordinary pipeline on an ordinary shift, is a far better test.
Ask directly and ask for it in writing, covering two separate things: whether generative tools are used inside the edit, and whether your files are used to train any model. Many pipelines now include generative fill or AI background extension without telling the buyer.
The production country is not the quality signal; the QC structure is. What matters is that the studio states the location plainly, will sign your DPA rather than only its own, and can handle Standard Contractual Clauses or the UK Addendum where they apply.
Monthly volume, categories, and where post-production is slipping. We answer the eleven questions in writing.