Fashion Photo Editing: Guide For Ecommerce & Studios

The world of fashion evolves quickly. Studios and photographers are required to keep up with this pace, or else brands might lose on the trending opportunities.

In all this organized chaos, one thing that needs to be consistent for a brand is fashion photo editing.

What it is? How can it be done professionally? We will cover everything in this article.

PixelPhant has been a leading fashion photo editing service provider for eCommerce for the last 8 years. While each brand has a unique product presentation style, they follow their specific style guide for all their images as well.

In this guide, we are highlighting all our experiences and sharing everything about fashion photo editing that will help you get started.

What is Fashion Photo Editing?

Fashion photo editing is a specific division in image editing—specialized in fashion images for eCommerce, social media, editorials, and more. This style of photo editing mostly requires you to consistently follow the brand’s style guide and present the product authentically and appealingly.

Retouching, dust removal, color correction, image straightening, and alignment are some of the most basic fashion photo editing services.

It is important to note that, when working with brands, fashion photo editing can include various types of fashion photography. Some of the most common types of fashion photography are:

• Model Photography
• Flat Lay Photography
• Ghost Mannequin Photography

Each style of fashion photography has its unique editing challenges that require expert oversight. Especially when working with fashion brands that use more than one style of photography to present their products.

In a recent survey of PixelPhant fashion photography, we saw that 95.6% of the fashion eCommerce brands use model photography, 57.2% use flat-lay photography, and 57.2% use ghost mannequins.

It is important to ensure that while the photography style changes, the overall presentation stays consistent to curate that unique brand experience. This can be done with professional photo editing only.

How to Edit Fashion Photographs?

Editing fashion photographs can vary in complexity. If you are looking for basic photo editing, a beginner’s setup and guide would be enough. On the other hand, if you are looking forward to a more advanced photo retouching service, you need to move ahead with a professional setup and guide shared here.

For Beginner

Beginners are the brands or studios that want to optimize their images—just a bit while creating a simple yet professional look.

1. Choosing the right Software: Start by choosing photo editing software that suits your needs. For beginners, Adobe Lightroom is a great option. It offers a wide array of options for basic photo editing tools and file management.

2. Start with Basic Adjustments:  Basic Adjustments include cropping, straightening, and adjusting exposure (brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, and whites) to improve the overall look of the image. It is important to note here that while I want all the images to be consistent—simply applying a common setting will not work. Check for consistency manually and adjust the settings accordingly.

3. Color Correction: In the next step you shall focus on adjusting the colors to make them more vibrant or correct any color cast. The color of your fashion images must match the actual product. Color inaccuracy is one of the leading causes of product return. Use tools like temperature, tint, and the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance) sliders.

4. Skin Retouching: If you are editing a model, which generally does require professional services, use the retouching tools to smooth skin. Also, remove blemishes, and reduce imperfections as per what style of presentation you are looking for. If you want to maintain a natural look, be subtle.

5. Enhance Details: Showing off details is important to build trust among customers. Sharpen the image to enhance fine details like clothing texture and accessories. You can use the clarity and sharpening tools but avoid overdoing it.

6. Selective Adjustments: Not all areas of your images will be equally illuminated. Some will be dark, and some might be overexposed. Use brushes or masks to make selective adjustments to specific areas, such as enhancing the eyes, lips, or clothing. This can help draw attention to the fashion elements.

7. Noise Reduction: Lastly, if needed, reduce noise or any graininess from the image. Keep an eye on low-light conditions.

For Professionals

Here, professionals are the brand and studios with a very specific requirements and style guides. They want all the products to be presented in a particular way. This includes professional editing, layering, selection, and more.

1. Advanced Software & files: Professional photo editing generally starts with RAW files that store all the details during the shoot. These are large files due to the information they store but make photo editing much more efficient. For editing these images advanced software like Adobe Photoshop and Capture One is used to control all editing.

2. Color Grading & Frequency Separation: With Color grading, you shall follow the unique color grading style that suits the brand style. Techniques like Frequency separation would also be handy for advanced skin retouching while preserving texture and details.

3. Dodge and Burn: Apply dodge and burn techniques to enhance shadows and highlights, sculpting the model’s features and clothing. This is important in fashion photo editing as the attention must stay on the products.

4. Advanced Selections: Master advanced selection tools and techniques for precise adjustments to specific elements within the photo. It could be a particular section of the clothing or a section of the whole image that needs little selective editing, Advanced selection is best for the same.

5. High-End Retouching: High-end retouching is a specialized form of photo editing used in the fashion and beauty industry to achieve a level of perfection and flawless beauty that goes beyond what’s typically done in standard retouching. Every pore, wrinkle, and fine line is meticulously addressed to create a flawless presentation.

6. Quality Control: Quality check is an important step, especially when dealing with bulk fashion photo editing images. It is important to pay attention to every detail, ensuring that the final image meets the highest professional standards. Consistency is key here.

7. File Management: File management is as important as quality checks for a studio and eCommerce with images in multiple categories. It starts with file names and maintaining your files systematically with a clear workflow.

Benefits of Using Fashion Photo Editing Services

Easy to start & experiment

Working with fashion photo editing services like PixelPhant makes it easy to get started and experiment with a new product presentation style.

Think about it. Editing bulk images requires software, training, and most importantly time. Outsourcing it to a fashion photo editing service saves you from all that blunder without stress on your budget.

PixelPhant photo editing service pricing starts at just $0.80 per image. This already includes basic services like background, cropping, resizing, and color correction.

You can simply create a custom specification in your PixelPhant dashboard and send your files. What’s next? You’ll receive your edited fashion images in your chosen turnaround time.

Easy to scale

Fashion photo editing services experience a roller coaster ride when it comes to the number of images per month. We work with studios that generally have a requirement of only 300 images a month.

But the same studios send over 3000 images a week during holiday seasons.

PixelPhant’s Fashion photo editing services are trusted by eCommerce and studios—such that they can rely on our service during this massive fluctuation.

They trust us to deliver every image with superior quality in their chosen turnaround time, no matter what the quantity is.

Faster batch processing

We understand how time-sensitive eCommerce and studios are. They have to work on close deadlines, without compromising on the quality.

That is when the benefits of working fashion photo editing service truly feel lively. Services like 100-Min Photo Editing by PixelPhant are helping eCommerce studios make products live in less than a day.

This is possible due to an optimized workflow and a team of experienced retouchers who are committed to the same mission.

It is harder to replicate this commitment and workflow if one is not a dedicated photo editing service.

Access to experienced retouching

While replicating the efficiency of a photo editing service might be an uphill task, working along with them is much easier than ever.

With Fashion photo editing services, you can connect and get your images edited by retouchers with years of experience.

What about the custom editing specifications? You can create your custom specifications, set up a meeting to share what you are looking for, or simply share the sample images for reference.

It has become much easier to connect and work remotely now. The best part is, you can skip the process of setting up a team and training them.

Just sign-up and we are all set to fulfill your photo editing requirements.

Reduces stress on editing budget

When you outsource photo editing to PixelPhant, the price is calculated on the complexity and the turnaround time you selected.

That is to say, you are paying for the services you opt for. No monthly subscription or add-on charges.

With outsourcing, you can easily skip the initial cost of hiring, software, infrastructure, training, and management.

Even if we talk about eCommerce and studios with dedicated photo editing teams.

They choose PixelPhant to speed up the bulk work of product photo editing, while the team can fulfill the in-house and creative demands.

Reduces the burden on your creative team

If we talk about eCommerce, the creative team has to handle two types of work. The first one is creative work. This is for marketing, editorials, social media, and overall brand presence that require a lot of internal team communication.

Another field of work that creative teams generally handle is bulk fashion photo editing. This is important, but monotonous in nature. It requires very few updates or communication since the idea is to create a consistent brand presence.

PixelPhant handles the second type of photo editing for eCommerce and studios. We take over the bulk photo editing work, put it into our optimized workflow, and deliver your custom specifications quicker and more effectively.

Quality-checked to match requirements

Working with professionals means you also outsource the need to overlook each and every single process on your own.

All you need is a clear specification of what you want, and photo editing services will deliver it to you.

We have a two-stage quality check setup that ensures that every image that reaches to, matches with the specification of the order.

The goal is to keep the correction rate to a minimum and achieve 100% First Time Approval of our fashion photo editing service.

Easy to update requirements

While updates in product photo editing are less, they are not rare—especially for eCommerce with multiple product categories.

Just like everything, eCommerce and creatives keep testing how to present their product better.

 When you are working with a product photo editing service, you can simply update your specifications, get images in just 24 hours, and compare the results.

All it takes are your basic specifications and reference images of what you are looking for. Our photo editing experts will get started with the new update in no time. 

Additional post-production services.

When you are working with a dedicated fashion photo editing service like PixelPhant, you don’t just get access to leading retouching and editing services.

You also get additional post-production services of renaming the files, uploading them, managing them in your preferred file transferring portal, and much more as per your custom requirements.

Anything that takes up additional time from your creatives can be handled by PixelPhant. A benefit no less than having a dedicated photo editing team—working remotely.

Get in Touch!

Fashion photo editing, as you see, is both creative and bulk work at the same time. It takes collaboration to achieve the desired results.

Want to get started with fashion photo editing? PixelPhant is all set to onboard you and get started with photo editing with your customer specifications.

Get a free trial of our service and experience our workflow firsthand. Our experts will ensure all your editing requirements are taken care of, too, in just 24 hours.