Client Profile.
Biggest swim school based out of UK providing highly developed swim programs to over 50,000 pre-school aged children was looking for image editing expertise to post-process 4000+ portrait images every week.
Business Need.
The swim school was looking out to provide underwater infant portraiture to parents and caretakers. Given the voluminous requirement they needed an experienced partner with a scalable resource pool who could meet tight delivery timelines and adhere to quality standards in a cost-efficient manner.
- 2-4 weeks turnaround time was to be reduced to 1 week
- Establish an online distribution method to send thousands of edited images directly to end customers meeting all confidentiality guidelines.
- Image editing experts to share review feedback with photographers on their work.
The Swim school approached HitechDigital for editing and retouching thousands of underwater infant portraits and sending those HDR quality images directly to end customers in shortest possible turnaround time.
Challenges.
The initial scope of work included editing and retouching thousands of images every week. Image editing team was required to design a workflow considering multiple and varied activities and guidelines:
- Sorting, selecting, editing and retouching 4, 000 plus images every week
- Images to be made attractive with least possible editing/retouching
- Editing portrait images while maintaining uniformity in the final look
- Automated set up for sending edited images to end customers
Solution.
The solution was initiated by coordinating with client’s photographers to understand their requirements in terms of color correction, noise reduction, retouching etc. Implemented the workflow to reduce the turnaround time from 2-3 weeks to an agile 05 days image editing and retouching cycle. Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Lightroom were leveraged to post-process HD quality underwater portrait images. Final product had a list of edits/retouches done attached to it – to share feedback with the photographer who clicked the portrait.
Approach.
Manually receiving, selecting and editing portrait images was not a cost-efficient, a cumbersome and error-prone way to handle the image editing project. We addressed the situation through an automated post-processing workflow; which even ensured seamless delivery of portraits to end clients.
Execution
- Macro-driven workflow supported the integration of FTP folder to receive images in JPEG formats with utmost security, compliant to GDPR norms.
- Scripts were written to auto-classify images – according to the photographer who captured it.
- Bots were used to assign portrait images to designated editors depending on image complexity, expertise and editor’s connect with the photographer.
- Edit the portraits according to parameters defined in scope of work.
- Adobe Bridge was leveraged to improve overall quality of editing and retouching.
- Alert/notification to the team lead if an editor spent more than required time editing a single image.
- Edited images in the final lag would get automatically assigned to a multi-layered quality check process.
Quality Check and Audit:
- Experienced portrait image editors were deployed to qualify post-processed images against the checklist of quality requirements from client.
- Alerts/notifications for all types of QC edits were generated with ML backed algorithms and shared with team.
Dispatch:
- Process of emailing edited portraits to end clients was automated with help of Macros
Software and Technology: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Light room, Adobe Bridge, Custom tools and technologies
Business Impact.
Turnaround time reduced from 2-4 weeks to 5 days
Reduced cost/image resulting in savings of overall image editing expenses
High quality images enhanced customer experience
Elevated brand equity and recall amongst customers
