Blog
Notes on editing, colour and post-production from the BeEdits studio.
Latest
BusinessEditing hours put a ceiling on how many jobs a photographer can take. Here is how to measure that ceiling, what outsourcing changes, and how to run it as an ongoing arrangement.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Read the noteRetouching craft
A checklist that takes about two minutes per frame and catches nearly everything a client would otherwise catch for you.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Retouching craft
Clients rarely have the words for what is wrong with a retouched photograph. They just do not like it. These ten are usually the reason.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Retouching craft
In six situations, automated retouching is not a slightly worse option but the wrong kind of tool. Most of them are about accuracy and consent rather than looks.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Retouching craft
The useful split is not quality. It is whether a task is an operation with a correct output or a judgement about what this photograph needs — and every retouching job is some of each.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Buyer guides
Commercial retouching works under a constraint portrait work does not: the finished image stands in for a real object that someone will buy and unpack.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Buyer guides
Beauty retouching is judged at magnifications where nothing hides. That makes it the easiest category to assess yourself, if you know where to look.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Buyer guides
Portrait retouching is judged on one question: does the subject still look like themselves? Every check below is a way to find that out before you commit a client's session.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Buyer guides
Wedding galleries need things a general retouching service is not set up for: your style matched across mixed light, a whole set that holds together, and capacity in peak season.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Buyer guides
No independent body ranks retouching studios. What differs is the type of provider, and each type suits a different kind of job. Written by BeEdits, which is one of them.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Workflow
Colour space gets confusing because two questions share one word: what you work in, and what you deliver. They have different answers.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
How-to
Instagram re-compresses every upload, and you cannot stop that. You can control the file it starts from, and that decides most of how the post looks.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Workflow
A raw file is measurement data; a JPEG is a finished interpretation of it. That one difference explains almost every practical consequence of choosing between them.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Workflow
Most delays in outsourced retouching happen before anyone opens a file. Ten minutes spent on the link, the brief and the privacy question saves a day of back-and-forth.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Workflow
Speed at volume comes from making decisions once instead of on every frame. Here is where those decisions hide, and an eleven-step order that removes them.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Business
Turnaround has two parts: the time spent editing, and the time spent on everything around the editing. The second part is usually where a job slows down.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Business
Per-image retouching prices look arbitrary until you see what changes between tiers. The price follows the number of decisions made about a frame and how long each one takes.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Business
A portfolio is a studio's best work on its best files, chosen by the studio. These are the checks that tell you how a service will handle yours.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Business
The answer comes from four numbers you can measure on your next wedding. Here is the sum, the split that protects your style, and the cases where the answer is no.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Workflow
Culling decides which frames the client sees. Editing decides what those frames look like. They take different skills, fail in different ways and hand over very differently.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Retouching craft
Fabric without folds looks painted on. The skill is deciding which wrinkles describe the garment's shape and which are just creases from the hanger.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Retouching craft
Teeth are not white. Making them white is one of the most recognisable retouching mistakes, and the fix is to reduce saturation rather than raise brightness.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Retouching craft
A perfectly flat backdrop looks wrong. Real backdrop paper has light falloff, and removing it is what makes a cleaned background announce itself.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
How-to
Lifting shadows brings up noise and colour shift together, and skin shows both first. The order you work in decides whether the recovery is usable.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Workflow
Clients notice inconsistency across a gallery long before they notice imperfection in a single frame. The fix is a reference frame and a routine, not a preset.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
How-to
One white balance cannot be correct for two light sources. The fix is to stop looking for one and correct each source separately.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Retouching craft
Flyaways are less a masking problem than a decision problem: which strands are distraction and which are the reason the photograph works.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Retouching craft
Plastic skin has one cause: colour and texture were corrected together. Separating them is the core of the technique, and it is less complicated than it sounds.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
How-to
There are four kinds of blur and only some of them can be improved. Identifying which one you have takes thirty seconds and saves an hour of pointless sharpening.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
How-to
The artificial look after upscaling nearly always comes from three mistakes, and all three are avoided by changing the order you work in.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Tools and software
Automatic background removal is close to solved for simple subjects and still fails on the same four things. Knowing which frame you have saves the argument.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Tools and software
Several applications do most of what photographers use Photoshop for. What transfers, what does not, and what switching actually costs.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Tools and software
Both are excellent raw processors. They differ on colour control, tethered studio work and how they organise files, and those differences decide it, not the sliders.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Tools and software
They are not competitors. One manages and processes hundreds of files; the other changes specific pixels in one. Knowing which job you are doing answers the question.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Tools and software
Portrait retouching needs four specific capabilities. Most applications have three of them, which is why so many portrait photographers keep two open.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 7 min read
Tools and software
Free upscalers do the same job as paid ones, with tighter limits in exactly the places that matter: output resolution, batch size and what happens to your file.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 5 min read
Tools and software
An upscaler does not recover detail; it invents plausible detail. Knowing which subjects survive that, and how to test it, is how you choose one.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Tools and software
Free AI editing tools are real and some are very capable. The costs show up somewhere other than the price: resolution caps, watermarks and what happens to your files.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Tools and software
AI editing tools are not one category. Some take real time out of a working week; others create a new job called checking what the software did.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 6 min read
Tools and software
There is no single best editor. Cataloguing, raw processing and pixel work are three different jobs, and the right software depends on which one fills your week.
BeEdits Editorial Team · · 7 min read
