What happens to an image after the shutter closes — culling, colour, retouching, export — and why colour accuracy is a returns-rate issue.
A raw file is not a photograph. It is the data a photograph is made from. Here is the path from one to the other.
Ingest and backup, before anything else
Cards are copied to two places before a single frame is opened: one working drive, one backup. Cards are not formatted until both copies verify.
This sounds obvious and it is the step that gets skipped when a shoot runs late. A corrupted card with no second copy is not a technical problem, it is a re-shoot.
Culling in two passes
The first pass is mechanical — discard anything out of focus, badly timed or duplicated. The second is editorial: from the survivors, choose the frames that do the job the shot list assigned.
Two passes are faster than one, because the first requires no judgement and the second is made from a much smaller set.
Colour first, retouching second
Colour is corrected before any pixel work, because retouching against the wrong colour means redoing it.
For product and material work we shoot a colour reference in the first frame of each setup and grade against it. This is not a nicety. When a customer receives a fabric or a finish in a visibly different shade to the photograph, they return it and they write a review about it. Colour accuracy is a returns-rate issue before it is an aesthetic one.
For campaign work we grade for mood once accuracy is established — but the accurate version is kept, because the marketplace listing needs it even when the campaign does not.
What we remove, and what we do not
We remove what should not be there: dust, sensor spots, stray threads, packaging damage that is not representative of what ships, reflections of the crew in glossy surfaces.
We do not remove what is genuinely there. A texture, a weave, a seam or a machining mark is information the buyer needs. Retouching a product until it looks like a render makes it less persuasive, not more, because it stops looking real.
For people: skin is evened, not replaced. Blemishes go, pores stay.
Export is part of the job
One approved image becomes many files — a hero crop for the site, a square for the feed, a vertical for stories, a tight crop for the listing, a high-resolution version for print, and a compressed web version at the size it will actually render.
Delivering full-size JPEGs and letting the client crop them is how brands end up with heads cut off on Instagram and 6 MB images slowing their site to a crawl.
How long it takes
Roughly a day of post per shoot day for a catalogue; two to three for campaign work with heavy retouching. Anyone promising same-day delivery on a campaign is either not retouching or not sleeping.
- retouching
- colour grading
- post-production
- workflow
