The shoot went well, the client picked twelve frames for the campaign, and the retoucher has finished the first pass. The JPEGs go out by email, and two days later the reply comes in: “Can you make the skin a bit softer on the second one? And the bottle looks too orange. Otherwise great!”
Nobody can say which photo is “the second one”, how much softer is enough or what the orange is being compared to. The retoucher guesses, the next round comes back with “that’s not what I meant”, and a job that should have wrapped on Friday is still open the following Wednesday.
Most of what’s written about photo proofing covers the step before this one, when the client picks favorites from a contact sheet.
This post is about the step after: getting retouching approved photo by photo on commercial, product and corporate shoots, where the production company has to show exactly what changed and get a clear yes.
In short
- Ask for each note as a mark on the photo plus one sentence on what should change and by how much.
- For brand colors, ask for the reference instead of “warmer” or “more red”.
- Show each retouch next to the original or the previous round, and keep every version.
- Agree at the start on a verdict per photo or per set, who approves and how many rounds are included.
- Send review files as sRGB JPEGs with the color profile embedded.
Why email and chat don’t work for retouch approval
Attachments arrive in whatever order the email app chooses, and a phone may sort them differently, so “the second one” can be two different photos for two different people.
Words are a poor way to describe a visual change. “Softer”, “warmer” and “cleaner” mean one thing to the client and another to the retoucher, who has to guess both the place and the amount.
When clients do mark something, it’s usually a screenshot scribbled on a phone and sent back through a messaging app that compresses it on the way.
Round two then arrives as a fresh batch of files with no easy way to put it next to round one, so “it looked better before” can’t be checked.
Ask for notes pinned to the spot
In every note, ask for a mark on the image showing where and a sentence saying what should change and by how much. One change per note.
Say what has to stay, too, because retouchers tend to clean up more than the client wanted.
| What the client writes | What the retoucher needs |
|---|---|
| “Make the skin softer” | Circle under her eyes: “Soften the dark circles by about half. Keep the freckles.” |
| “The bottle looks orange” | Arrow on the label: “Should match the red in the brand guide. Next to the real bottle it reads orange.” |
| “Clean up the background” | Box on the left: “Remove the power cable behind the sofa.” |
| “Fix her hair” | Arrow on the right: “Tidy the loose strands against the white wall.” |
Color notes need extra care. The client may be looking on a phone with night mode on, which warms everything up.
For brand and product colors, ask for the reference, either the color value in the brand guide or the product itself, instead of “warmer” or “more red”.
Show the retouch against the original
A client can only approve a retouch if they can see what it changed, so put it next to the untouched frame or the previous round instead of making them flip between files.
- Side by side shows the overall look, like the color of the whole frame.
- A split line you drag across the photo works best for local changes such as skin, stray hairs or dust on a product.
- An overlay with adjustable opacity catches small shifts in shape or position, like a straightened label, that are easy to miss otherwise.
Keep every version, including the original frame, because someone always asks what it looked like before. When you send a new round, say which photos changed, so the client doesn’t go through forty images looking for the three that moved.
One verdict per photo or per set
Decide at the start how the client signs off.
A verdict per set works when the photos are used together, such as a campaign that launches on one date. The client leaves notes on individual photos and approves the set when nothing is left to fix.
A verdict per photo makes sense when the photos go out at different times or have different owners. The CEO portrait may need the communications team, while the product shots go straight to e-commerce, and neither should be held up by the other.
Either way, name the person who approves and keep a record of who approved which version and when. The post on proof of client approval covers what that record needs.
Then put the rounds in the quote: how many rounds of retouching are included, that a round is one batch of notes on the whole set, and what counts as a new request.
A different crop, a new background or swapping a photo for another frame from the shoot is a new request. How to stop endless revision rounds has more on keeping that number down.
Which files to send for review and for delivery
For review, send JPEGs in sRGB with the color profile embedded.
The W3C’s CSS color specification tells browsers to treat an image with no profile as sRGB, so an Adobe RGB or ProPhoto file that loses its profile on export shows up flat and dull, and the client asks you to fix a problem that exists only on their screen.
Make review files big enough to hold up when the client zooms in and small enough to open quickly on a phone.
Final delivery depends on where the photos are going.
- Full-resolution JPEGs in sRGB cover websites and social media.
- PNG keeps the transparent background of a product cutout.
- Print goes in whatever format and color space the printer asks for.
Check with the printer or the agency’s designer before converting anything to CMYK yourself. Keep the same file names from review to delivery, so a name always points to the same frame.
The message template and the checklist in how to share a video with clients for review work for photos with small changes.
When the stills sit next to the videos
Production companies often shoot stills on the same day as the video: product shots, portraits of the people interviewed, behind the scenes. If the videos go through a review link and the photos go by email, the client has two places to look and you end up with two approval trails for one campaign.
Keep the photos under the same client and project as the videos.
How this works in RecReview
In RecReview, a photo gallery is a delivery on the same board as your videos, with a code from the client’s sequence, and it shows up in the client portal next to the videos from the same project.
You upload JPEG, PNG or WebP files of up to 40 MB each. Your team sees the photos in a grid.
The client sees one photo at a time, zooms in, and moves through the set with the arrows or the thumbnail strip, where badges mark the photos with comments or new versions.
Each comment belongs to one photo. The client draws on it with a pen, arrow, box or circle and writes the note, and anyone in the conversation can reply or react. Your team marks each note resolved when it’s done.
A retouch goes up as a new version of the same photo, and earlier versions stay. The client opens the version menu on that photo and compares two versions side by side, with a split they drag across the frame, or overlaid with an opacity slider.
To show the before, upload the untouched frame first and the retouch as its new version.
The verdict covers the whole gallery: the client approves or requests changes, and an approval is recorded with their name and the date. If some photos need their own sign-off, put them in a separate gallery.
Approving takes a contact of that client. Everyone you send the gallery to from RecReview is added as one, and with contact roles turned on, only the client’s managers approve. Someone who got the link forwarded can still comment and ask for changes.
After approval, the client’s main contacts get an email with a link to the gallery, and people allowed to download get a button for a ZIP with the latest version of every photo, exactly as you uploaded it.
The gallery link takes a password, an expiry date and required identification, like a video link. More on the photo galleries page.
