Managing Retouching in High-Volume Content Production
By Sean Arbabi | Digital Production Leader

Tackling the retouching challenge of balancing quality versus quantity in ecomm, editorial, and social media environments require high-quality accuracy and consistency. Numerous moving and interconnected parts require right-brain functions for visual, intuitive, and creative components, and left-brain functions to handle verbal, analytical, and orderly sections. This daily thought activity can seem daunting. As a leader, meeting these post-production demands, you need to juggle the various mental modes of the position. You need a solid team, proper planning, compliance from strategic partners, an efficient system, favorable processes, all while analyzing data and sharing metrics. This is my strategy in leading photo studio teams for two major retailers. I was doubted and questioned about my approach, yet I knew from experience, this was the formula for success, and slowly but surely the results began to prove it.

Assembling the right team

Choosing and/or hiring solid professionals is vital — a retouching team needs to collaborate well, balance each other’s knowledge and mastery by sharing techniques and understanding of emerging technologies, as well as being flexible with requests and deadlines they oversee.

• Consider adopting a philosophical approach when working with professionals you hire or inherit, following doctrines to help form a positive productive work environment. I use servant leadership to lead by example, creating an environment that drives success, where team members feel valued and heard.

• Develop close connections with all retouchers, gain their trust, allow ideas to flow freely, and discuss best practices and operations to drive team success.

• Ultimately, you are responsible for guiding the team, yet each team member should own their role and responsibilities. Assembling great teams through proper management ensures retouchers are invested in all exercises affecting quality and output.

Planning to be proactive

To gain control of the influx of assets your team is managing, you must determine bandwidth based on expected numbers and proper lead times, including overflow during peak seasonal periods.

• Map out timelines by working backward from deadlines to confirm assets are received in time for team success.

• Whether utilizing freelance or on-call retouchers or working with external vendors, having an outsourcing option allows the team to staff up or down, handling seasonal swings from various stakeholders.

• If you’re outsourcing to a vendor who manages a dedicated team of retouchers, asset management and quality control can take three months to a year as you coordinate the flow of images that require unique specs and details based on brand style guides.

SLAs and SOWs

Service Level Agreements (focused on performance and service quality) and Scope of Work (specifying tasks, deadlines, and deliverables) are the best methods to outline commitments between partners, including standards each provider must adhere to. Compliance is key to organization, quality, and ingestion of assets.

• The studio team should be your closest connection, following an SOW (scope of work) for delivering assets consistently and accurately based on per-project and final-use specifications. 

• The DAM and Web teams are the next connections regarding quality and delivery.

• Establishing a close relationship with Creative Leads and Art Directors ensures clear communication for notes, markups, annotations. With rare exceptions for specific projects, three retouching rounds are the norm. 

Building a robust system

The more robust system you utilize, the easier your team can ingest, queue, select, and batch assets, then QC efficiently, respond to markups, and deliver on time. First, understand the current system, then listen and gather optimal solutions while building consensus regarding upcoming plans, adjustments and directions. Business directives and department objectives are the combined goals to stay up-to-date and efficient.

• A reliable system is critical to successful high-volume content production whether you retouch internally, externally, or operate under a hybrid model. Interconnected software and project management platforms with automation, such as verybusy.io’s platform accelerate time-to-market deliverables and reduce errors, streamlining post-production.

• Part of this system should also involve proper industry-standard equipment, necessary tools to judge color, contrast, and exposure-  high quality calibrated monitors, Wacom tablets, and light booths with up-to-date balanced lighting.

Optimal Processes

Best procedures critical for creative consistency should be based on industry standards, tenets widely tested and confirmed. Process documentation is key to managing and maximizing efficiency, especially in a high-volume environment, often based around your team’s abilities, as well as software and system parameters unique to your team. These docs should be up-to-date, as should your retouching playbook, especially for omnichannel marketing and/or shared services teams where you are ingesting assets from multiple brands, each with unique specifications and style guides. Processes should also be shared with vendors, specifically for outsourced work you are providing. Refining your operation continually helps you stay up-to-date with techniques and technology while ensuring efficiency throughout the department.

Measuring success

Calculating your team’s progress confirms your overall plan and team efforts are working smoothly and efficiently. Using metrics, data measured daily, weekly, monthly, and annually against your goals, allows you to benchmark your team’s success. Retouching examples can include asset counts, lead times, reliability (i.e. quality and on-time percentages), and budget savings. The SLA your team has with the Web team should also be based on metrics to measure performance.

Possessing the finest team, planning, compliance, system, operational standards, and metrics is the formula for successful retouching in a high-volume environment. Once you have these pieces in place, you can fine-tune the engine in a variety of ways to stay current and competitive.