5 eComm Retouching Must-haves
Here’s how and why advanced retouching enables brands and retailers to become leaders.
We’re presenting you five retouching best practices to increase the image quality, output more images more quickly, and sell more products. You’ll see that advanced retouching is like adding a team of digital stylists to your studio. Yes, the more you can do in-camera the better, but the key to consistent quality at scale is retouching in post-production.
To demonstrate retouching changes, we’re using before-and-after images in a slider to help you spot the differences.
- Retouching Apparel: Shape & Crease Reduction
Apparel product photography is about demonstrating shape through fit. Retouching can remove the appearance of a wrinkled misfit, bunching, keeping the silhouette consistent between products and achieving overall symmetry and consistency.
- Retouching electronics: Surfaces
Textures, surfaces, lighting and reflective areas. Everything is geared towards the hero shot and making it look sleek yet magnificent. The challenge is correcting all the manufacturing imperfections while enhancing the details.
- Retouching Jewelry: the “wow-effect”
When it comes to the precision of jewelry retouching, we understand that every tiny dust of speck counts. Color can be a challenge. After shooting, most images of jewelry would look a little dull at first. Avoiding a dull tone is important to retouching jewelry.
Adding shadows is an important step in jewelry retouching as it helps create a more realistic shopping experience for your customers. It can also help your jewelry and product pages stand out from the competition. All the work goes into adding that “wow-effect” to every piece.
- Models: retouching skin
Skin retouching is one of the most advantageous ways to retouch product images that are on-model. There are many different philosophies when it comes to skin retouching, and we’re not going to say that one is better than another. What’s most important is that you are consistent. Things to keep in mind as you define your approach: removing blemishes and wrinkles, marks, even out skin tone and texture. If you are going for the natural look, a general rule of thumb is to leave anything permanent while removing temporary imperfections. For example, you may remove goosebumps, acne, or bruises while leaving freckles and birthmarks. When considering a more classic retouch look, you’ll want to be sure you don’t go too far and cross the increasingly legislated boundary between real and Photoshopped
- Retouching cosmetics: 50 Shades of Color
Color and accuracy are specifically relevant when retouching cosmetics. From the brand logos to the dozens of shades of each product, matching the image to it’s real life subject is the key. Clean surfaces are also important, and cosmetics can vary wildly between opaque and translucent to shiny and reflective. Once again, consistency plays a key role in binding it all together in the detail pages and grid views on your website
Details, accuracy and consistency. If your customer sees attention to detail in your product images, they transfer that belief to your design, build quality, and service. Every link in the chain affects trust and influences the buying decision.
Carroll Creative is the solution to your retouching dilemmas. We offer tailored solutions to keep the content retouching process consistent and scalable, without sacrificing quality and deliverability.
Send us your test, we’d love to show you what we can do