We retouch around 40,000 images a month. The same handful of on-set decisions turn up again and again as the reason a job takes three times longer than it should. None of them are about talent - they are about habits. Fix these nine and your retouching invoice falls without anyone shooting differently in any way that matters.
Off-white, light grey or a white sweep lit unevenly is the most expensive background there is. It is too close to the product edge for a quick levels pull, so the whole item needs a hand-drawn path instead. Either light your white properly so it clips to pure white, or shoot on a colour that is obviously different from the product. The in-between is what costs money.
Without a grey card or a colour checker in at least one frame per lighting setup, matching colour across a range becomes guesswork - and guesswork is what generates "the jumper arrived the wrong shade" returns. One reference frame per setup is enough. See colour correction.
A pin on a plain seam is a two-second clone. A pin across a printed pattern, a stripe or a logo means rebuilding the pattern by hand. Same pin, twenty times the work. Clip on seams, hems and edges wherever you can.
This is the single most expensive omission we see. If you do not shoot the inside of the collar separately, the retoucher has to invent what the inside of the garment looks like. Invented necks are why ghost mannequin work gets rejected. Two extra frames on set saves hours in post - see ghost mannequin retouching.
If the camera height, distance or lens changes between the main shot and the inside-neck shot, the perspective will not line up and the neck joint has to be rebuilt manually. Lock the tripod. Change the garment, not the camera.
Glass, chrome, patent leather and jewellery mirror everything in the room - softbox rectangles, the tripod, the photographer. Every one of those is manual cloning. A scrim or a tent removes most of them before the file ever reaches us.
A tight crop leaves no room to build a shadow, and no room to re-cut for a marketplace that wants a different aspect ratio. Leave breathing space around the product. It costs nothing on set and saves a re-shoot later. See shadow creation.
If each item in a range sits at its own angle and scale, someone has to align every file by hand. Mark the table. Use the same distance and the same placement for every SKU in a range, and a 200-piece catalogue becomes a batch job instead of 200 individual jobs - see catalogue and lookbook retouching.
JPEGs band on smooth gradients, and blown highlights cannot be recovered. On a white product against white, that is the difference between a clean edge and a mushy one. Send RAW where you can.
A short brief costs you five minutes and saves everyone a round of revisions:
Send five images and we will retouch them free, so you can judge the edges and the colour on your own products before committing to anything.
Get an instant quoteOften yes. A background that reads as white to the eye is rarely pure white in the file, and marketplaces reject off-white. If the white is clean and even, the cut-out is fast; if it is uneven or close to the product tone, a hand-drawn path is still the reliable route. See clipping path services.
Shooting ghost mannequin without a separate inside-neck frame. Everything else on this list adds minutes per image. That one adds hours, and it is the most common reason ghost mannequin work has to be redone.
Yes. Clean, consistent input sits at the lower end of every rate band; files that need hand-rebuilding sit at the top. Our published ranges are in the retouching cost guide.
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