Your spring launch is three weeks out. Three hundred images across 12 categories, with brand, legal, and regional review. Times Square, retail, paid social, and 15 markets.

EMEA is asking for color adjustments that directly contradict APAC's feedback from last week. Your account manager is fielding calls from three different stakeholders who all think they're looking at the latest version, but they're actually reviewing files from different rounds. Nobody documented which changes apply to hero images versus lifestyle shots. And you just discovered that half the "approved" files still need the logo updates that everyone agreed on two rounds ago.

If this sounds familiar, the demands of commercial retouching may have outgrown your operational approach.

The Scale Problem

Commercial image production has fundamentally changed with omnichannel and regionalization over the past 10–15 years. A single product launch now generates hundreds of high-resolution assets that need to perform across dozens of touchpoints. Those 10 key campaign visuals aren't just "10 images" anymore. They are 60+ variations optimized for different platforms, regions, and applications.

Many teams still rely on traditional project tools and basic review platforms, which handle milestones and file sharing. They’ve built elaborate workarounds involving shared drives, email chains, and spreadsheet tracking systems that would surprise your leadership team if they knew how mission-critical they'd become.

The Missing Framework

There's an entire operational discipline that governs how commercial images move through retouching.

Retouching Ops is the operational system for how commercial images move from intake to final delivery. This system covers revision lineage, feedback rounds, reference handling, approval signals, and release packaging across brands, regions, and channels. The outcome is less rework and more predictable outcomes.

The Usual Suspects

Round gate slippage: feedback breaks the acceptance criteria for the round, so retouchers do clean up in R1, then have to redo that work when composition changes in R2.

Conflicting approvals: marketing approved the lifestyle shots yesterday, but today the product team says they can't ship because the device screen display shows outdated interface elements.

Fragmented review input: the art director left detailed notes about adjusting the product angle and shadow intensity, but those comments are buried in an email thread, while the retoucher is working from the PDF markup that doesn't show those changes.

QA gate skipped: the lifestyle shots moved to final delivery but never passed the R2 color accuracy check. Now the product color doesn't match the hero images that were already approved.

Missing specs at intake: the brief says 'match brand color standards' but doesn't specify which color target or viewing condition and never makes it to the retoucher. The finals look different from what brand marketing expected.

The Cost

When Retouching Ops isn’t standardized, it compromises entire business initiatives:

• Missed launch windows when approval cycles extend beyond planned timelines because stakeholders and rounds weren’t defined

• Extra rounds from re-work caused by fragmented feedback and unclear approver authority

• Executive time drain when senior marketing leaders spend hours hunting down the correct file version instead of making strategic decisions

• Vendor relationships strained when deliverables are delayed from slow approvals

• Competitive disadvantage when faster-moving brands ship sooner

Track the cycle time per round, rework rate, and on-time delivery against media dates to see how this plays out in your own operations.

The bottom line: at scale, operational efficiency directly translates to market advantage. Brands that can move from concept to market faster, capture more opportunities, and adapt more quickly to changing conditions.

How Teams Fix This

Teams that have figured this out don't necessarily have bigger budgets. They just stopped treating operational breakdown as inevitable friction and started building systematic approaches:

• Introduce a decision rights map for each asset type: name the final approver per domain and who can request changes

• Create a label set for parallel approvals: for example, ‘Brand cleared,’ ‘Legal cleared,’ ‘Color approved,’ ‘Market ready APAC’

• Define round gates with acceptance criteria: R1 is composition and exposure fixes only (composition changes trigger a round reset), R2 color conformance checked under defined viewing conditions

• Implement a single review platform: actionable feedback lives on the surface, and off-surface notes must be pasted in before work starts

• Establish a release package checklist: approved rounds, delivery specs, references included

• Map image pipelines end to end: intake, references, round gates, approvers by asset type

• Standardize the process: review surface rules, approval labels and signals, handoff checklists, release packaging

• Run rounds with clear lineage: one source of truth, auto-stacked rounds, round-threaded comments, attached references, compare views for QA, full review round history

• Make progress visible: accessible labels and filters so everyone knows status without constant status meetings

The goal: document typical volumes and round expectations, name final decision rights, and set approval signals that indicate readiness for release. Evaluate tools based on whether they reduce cycle time and error rate for images at volume rather than how many generic collaboration features they offer.

Use Purpose-Built Tools

Here's the thing about project management systems: they track milestones instead of on-image change requests. Even if they handle mixed formats, they’re typically missing tools for the rapid-fire, visual iteration cycles that define commercial retouching, like when your creative director needs to quickly check how the retouching changed between version 4 and version 2 of the APAC lifestyle shots.

The result? Version confusion, missed notes, and delays that spill into media and retail timelines. What should have been a smooth approval process becomes an expensive game of telephone.

Video-first platforms present similar limitations. They're built around video workflows, and while they might work for a few sets of images here and there, they're not designed to be fully operational for commercial retouching at scale.

The teams outperforming everyone else have moved beyond trying to scale up small-agency workflows. They've invested in tools designed specifically for high-volume image work:

• Auto-stacked rounds that preserve revision lineage across formats that prevent falling back on chaos naming like "FINAL_v3_USETHIS_edited2_REVISED”

• Round-threaded comments and markups placed directly on the image with auto-zoom to the markup on comment click, so "fix the shadow on ground" becomes precise, actionable direction

• Side-by-side comparison tools that enable art directors compare creative direction instead of opening 12 Photoshop windows

• Reusable label sets for consistent approval signals across teams and regions

• Link-based review for external approvers who don't want accounts or platform training

Don’t think of these as “nice to have”. You need to move fast and without the back and forth when you're coordinating hundreds of images across multiple departments.

Ready to Implement Retouching Ops?

Sophisticated requirements require strategic approaches. Image retouching at scale requires the same strategies as in other business-critical operations.

Commercial image production will only get more complex. More channels, faster turnarounds, higher expectations for quality and consistency, especially with AI in the mix. The teams that master Retouching Ops now will be the ones capturing market opportunities while their competitors are still sorting through email threads and shared folders trying to find the right file version.

The infrastructure you build today determines whether you're leading the market or chasing it. Start by picking one systematic improvement and implement it for your next launch. Then measure the difference.

Watch this space for more insights into Retouching Ops. We'll be releasing a detailed implementation guide soon that shows you exactly how to build these systems. Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know when it drops.

See these concepts in practice with systems built for commercial image production workflows. Schedule a working session to explore how VeryBusy helps teams streamline high-volume commercial retouching.