Developing a comprehensive set of guidelines and best practices ensures consistent output, streamlines decision-making, reduces revisions across all projects, ultimately saving time and money while delivering higher quality and better accuracy. So how do we build a retouching playbook driving creative consistency?

When it comes to creative roles in an omnichannel environment, whether freelancing or full-time, I’m a firm believer in creating a set of blueprints and expectations guiding individuals and teams through various specs, steps, and tasks. A formula that leads to consistency. The second half of the approach is listening to your team experts to confirm every part of this master plan.

Map Process, Create Process Documentation

Retouching for specific channels requires a level of accuracy and uniformity. The iterative processes involved in prepping assets are about defining specifications, certain applied techniques, and efficient repetitive actions combined with the freedom and talent to solve creative challenges. Process documentation, along with team buy-in forms this consistent environment.

As I’ve shared in other articles, one major positive outcome of managing post-production with detailed process docs is the onboarding and training benefits it provides. A solid “Retoucher’s Playbook” maps start-to-finish procedures depending on the asset and its final application or variant. This provides quality assurance (QA), establishing and maintaining the set requirements for processing all assets.

The way I went about creating or updating process docs was to thoroughly analyze, record, and then confirm every step from receiving to delivering all digital files. Your team should be involved with ideas on how to cut redundant internal or external tasks, accelerate lead times, and improve final quality. A smart leader realizes this type of input ensures better results, helps discover inefficiencies, and adds to productivity, while making your team feel valued. When a team is part of creating a plan, they buy into it. 

Consider these essentials when creating a successful “Retoucher’s Playbook”:

• Regarding content and design, use clear concise language, illustrations, and examples, in an easy-to-view format. One vendor said of the process doc I created for major retailer while leading Post-Production it was the best they’d ever seen. It took time to build and confirm, but the time and money it saved was well worth it.

• Define the daily operation of ingesting and delivering assets including vendor image management if applicable.

• For each unique asset, create sections to define steps, specifications, requirements, references, and recommendations, while providing workflow tips from senior internal retouchers.

• Reduce unnecessary challenges, such as developing a universal color calibration process for the photo studio so Digital Techs deliver color and exposure-consistent files.

• Provide links to other docs, such as merchant product guides, naming conventions, product color references, useful overlays, and web specs.

• Finally, these digital master docs should be regularly updated, distinguishing the latest version (i.e. adding the date to the end of the file name). The latest version can also be the only accessible file, notifying contributing key parties of the update and location in a general distro.
  
  

QC’ing the process

• Quality control (QC) is the last part of image consistency before delivery. There are various ways to perform this action. Some systems today provide automated or bulk QC through AI while most efforts remain manual. Regardless of how your team performs QC, inspection of all final assets confirming quality and accuracy is critical. Ideally having a retouching manager overseeing internal and external work helps catch mistakes or rejections before being published, provides team feedback and training, ultimately helping the team’s reputation within the company.
  
  

So, what are the results of all of these efforts? Uniformity of all final assets. The by-product of creative consistency is it plays a direct part in a company’s revenue. It assists every department from the merchant’s increased sales, to the brand’s ROIs, to the Web team’s improved customer experience and loyalty through reduced returns, illustrating the importance of our work as retouchers.