How to outsource photo editing service for your eCommerce?
What does it mean to outsource photo editing for your online shop or eCommerce?
In e-commerce, product imaging is a three-part process: pre-production, production, and post-production. Pre-production is the planning and preparation of a photoshoot, production is the photoshoot itself, and post-production is editing photos. Photo editing can also be called image editing or digital photo retouching.
Outsourcing your image editing means that after the photoshoot, you will submit your images to an external retouching service who will edit the images and then return them. A professional outsourcing service will tune in to your particular style and aesthetic in order to consistently edit your images.
The edition can cover a wide variety of actions. Basic photo editing includes removing background from photo, creating image clipping paths, aligning products consistently within the image canvas, setting consistent margins, cropping, compressing images, setting aspect ratios along with image width and height and convert to file types like jpeg and png.
The most advanced outsourced (or outsourced) image editing services will also provide high-end retouching. The line between image editing and photo retouching is very blurred. Some people use the terms interchangeably but, specifically speaking of retouching, we mean that the product itself is being worked on in the image.
For example, in images intended for e-commerce, reducing wrinkles, retouching the skin of the model, adjusting the shadows and cleaning the product (such as removing pins, scuffs, dirt and lint) can be useful. . For more details, you can refer to this product photo retouching glossary.
Why outsource photo editing for e-commerce?
All product photos, almost without exception, will be edited. The choice faced by most growing brands, retailers, and photo studios is whether to outsource photo editing or do it in-house.
The reason is simple: outsourcing works. When done correctly, with a careful review and selection process, outsourcing will not only save you money on image editing but will also improve image quality for greater efficiency and speed.
1. Product photography is very seasonal, so you always have too many or too few touch-up specialists.
Because apparel photography, in particular, is seasonal and often catalog-oriented, there are huge variations in photoproduction from month to month and week to week.
That makes it difficult to consistently predict the exact number of internal “retouchers” that will be needed from period to period. They are generally going to be idle or overworked. Most companies have to hire additional freelance retouchers during peak hours.
If you outsource photo editing, you don’t have to worry about seasonal changes. An outsourced professional image editing service should allow you to scale — your process shouldn’t change if you have 100, 500, 1000, 5000 or 10,000 photos to edit per day. Also, when the price is aligned with the volume of the image, you are only paying for photo editing when it is really needed.
2. Repetitive photo editing tasks can lead to employee turnover.
Retouching, like many other works, is a mixture of art and meticulous detail. Some image edits, such as skin retouching and product area recreation, are challenging and exhilarating for a skilled retoucher. However, a lot of image editing, such as creating clipping paths and removing the background, does not require much experience but is time-consuming.
If you’re doing photo editing in-house (you probably only have a few retouchers) everyone should be able to handle each retouching task. More advanced skills mean higher salaries, and it also means they’ll get bored cropping images every day. This leads to employee turnover and costly hiring and onboarding processes, along with the difficulty of keeping your post-production team understaffed for unnecessary time wasters.
At Image Clipping Path India, we’ve taken a different approach than traditional photos by our photo editing service. Our external image editing service is based on our proprietary digital assembly line. We divide photo editing into different steps, completed by a combination of automated processes and specialized editors.
That means we can properly match the skill level of the photo editor with Photoshop tasks, so highly skilled editors are doing a much more challenging job. Less experienced editors can specialize in entry-level edits while developing their skill set.
