3 Ways to Speed Up Your Photo Retouching Skills

Here are a few ways to speed up your photo retouching skills:

Learn & Master Photoshop

The best way to become faster and more efficient in your photo retouching is to master Photoshop or any professional photo editing software that you are using. Make sure that you have the proper programs installed, but more importantly, make sure that you have customized it to fit your personal editing style.

You can do this by customizing the buttons on your main toolbars. Get rid of any functions that you don't usually use to make it easier and quicker for you to find the things that you do need. This also makes it a lot more organized and cleaner to browse from.

You can also set up actions in Photoshop to automate the actions that you often use. For example, if you conduct shoots inside the studio and use the same setup in terms of lighting every time, then you can preset the actions to your preferred contrast and levels. This will color-correct every photo with just one click. You can also create actions that will add your logo or name, add copyright information, merge layers, and resize the files for use on social media - all depending on your preferences and needs.

The primary goal for using actions is to speed up your retouching and spend less time setting up. Basically, if something requires more than 3 clicks, we recommend creating an action for it. This not only saves minutes off of your editing but can also speed up your retouching efforts in the long run.

Be a Picky Editor

What does this mean? We do not recommend for you to retouch every single photo that you take. This is especially true if you're taking hundreds of photos for every project. What you should do first is to handpick which photos you actually want to use and move those to a separate folder. Then, only edit and work on these select pictures. This will not only save time but also valuable energy and effort on your end.

You can begin with the process of elimination. Cancel out any photos that look bad or unusable at first glance. Next, do one or two sweeps of all the photos left and pick the best ones from the batch. If there are two or more shots that are too similar, then pick one and stick with that, discarding the others. Now you have narrowed down your selection and can speed up your retouching time significantly.

Edit in Batches

Finally, we recommend editing in batches. Batch retouching is one of the crucial techniques that you can do in Photoshop and other retouching apps. Since you already set up your actions beforehand, you can put them to better use by editing in batches.

For instance, you open up one or two dozen images that you have taken in a photoshoot. First, run your levels and contrast action. Next, run an action for special effects to apply your signature look. Take a glance at all the photos to check if everything is properly applied. Use CTRL + TAB to scroll through every photo. If everything looks good, run the add copyright and merge visible layers actions, followed by the save command. Save the finished images into a separate folder.

If all the actions were properly set up beforehand, editing two dozen photos should take no longer than 10 minutes. At this pace, you can edit and check a hundred photos under an hour.

We hope these tips help you become more efficient with your photo retouching tasks.

Outsource the work

Alternatively you can use a photo editing service like MIKU. MIKU allows you to send your photos to a team of professional designers who have years of experience and have access to the best photo editing tools available. You can ask for any changes you want and they usually send the photo back within 20 minutes. They are experts too so you can ask them for what changes they think would look best and request as many changes as you want.