What a Good Photo Revision Request Looks Like

The three parts of a revision request

Every request that gets done right the first time carries the same three parts.

1. Location. Which frame, and where in it. "The left cheek", "the sky above the roofline", "the logo on the mug".
2. Action. A verb the retoucher can perform: remove, lighten, warm up, straighten, crop to 4:5.
3. Degree or target. How far, or toward what. "Half as visible", "match the skin tone in frame 14", "keep the shadow, lose the stain".

Drop any one and the retoucher has to guess it. Guessing is where extra rounds come from, and a round costs real time on both sides. If your contract caps rounds, as covered in how many revision rounds a photo contract should include, a request that misses on the first try spends one of them.

Useless versus useful, on the same image

Here are five requests on the same imaginary product-and-portrait shoot. The left column is what clients actually type. The right column is the same intent, rewritten.

The rewrites are not longer in any way that matters. Most are one sentence. What changed is that each one carries a place, a verb and a target. For a deeper treatment of the first column, see translating vague client photo feedback into real edits.

Point at the frame instead of describing it

Half of the useless requests above are useless because words are a poor way to say "there". Describing a location in prose takes effort, and two people read "upper left" differently: is that the frame's corner or the subject's?

A mark on the image removes the ambiguity. When a client circles a blemish or draws a box for a crop, the position is part of the note, not a sentence about it. Appruva stores annotation coordinates as fractions of the image's width and height from 0 to 1, so a circle drawn on a phone lands on the same spot in a full-size file. That is a property of normalized coordinates, not of any particular screen.

Notes and markup in Appruva are one object, so a comment and the shape it points at cannot drift apart. If you are still receiving feedback as screenshots pasted into a deck, the PowerPoint markup loop shows why the context gets lost on the way.

Vocabulary clients can borrow

Clients are not going to learn retouching terms, and they should not have to. What helps is a small set of phrasings that map to real edits. Give them these:

The last row matters most. A reference beats a description for colour, because "warmer" means something different to every monitor and every person. Naming a frame, or attaching an image, turns an opinion into a target.

One request per note, one decision per round

The format that survives a long project is boring: one change per note, tied to one place, on one frame. A paragraph that asks for five edits across three areas cannot be ticked off halfway. Whoever works on it will either do all five or lose track of which two are done.

The same discipline applies to rounds. Ask clients to send everything in one pass rather than trickling notes over a week. Notes that arrive in pieces get actioned in pieces, and the retoucher opens and exports the same file several times. A single deadline helps, which is what proofing deadlines clients will actually meet goes into.

A template you can send with the link

Put this short brief above the review link, or paste it into your sign-off email. It is a request for a format, not a lecture on retouching.

When you mark a frame, please say (1) where, by drawing on the image, (2) what to change, and (3) how far, or which other frame to match. One change per note. Please send all notes in one pass by Friday.

You will not get perfect requests. You will get fewer "make it pop" notes, and the ones you do get can be answered with a single question: "Which part of the frame, and pop in which direction?" Asking that on the note itself is cheaper than guessing and delivering.

When the request is still vague

Sometimes a note arrives vague anyway, and the right move is a clarifying question rather than an edit. Ask it in the same place the note lives, so the answer attaches to the same frame. Keep the question closed: offer two readings and let the client choose. "Do you mean the jacket or the wall?" gets answered in seconds. "Can you clarify?" gets answered next week.

If a pattern keeps repeating, change the process, not the client. A shared brief at the start of the job, reviewed against the creative brief, prevents most "not quite right" notes before they exist.

What a vague request costs: the arithmetic

Nobody has a trustworthy industry average for this, so here is a worked example with assumptions stated. Suppose a vague note forces one extra round on a 20-frame set, and each round costs the retoucher 15 minutes of reopening, re-exporting and re-uploading per frame, plus 30 minutes of back-and-forth to work out what was meant. Those are assumptions, not measurements; swap in your own.

At a rate of 60 an hour, that one round is 330 in unbillable time. The rate is also an assumption. The point is the shape: the cost scales with frames touched, and a precise note reduces how many frames are touched twice, not just how many words are read.

A worked example: one frame, four rounds of wording

Take a single portrait with a visible stain on the shirt, a bright forehead, and a cluttered shelf behind the subject. Here is how one client's request improves as you ask for it to.

• First attempt: "Tidy this one up." The retoucher has to choose between the stain, the skin and the shelf, and may fix the wrong thing.
• Add location: "Tidy up the shirt and the shelf." Better, but "tidy" could mean clone out or just darken.
• Add action: "Remove the stain on the shirt; remove the shelf clutter." Now each is a verb with an object.
• Add degree: "Remove the stain on the right sleeve completely. Keep the shelf, but remove the two bottles at the left edge. Reduce the forehead shine by about half." Three notes, each with a place, an action and a limit.

The final version is four sentences. A retoucher can do it without a call, and a reviewer can check it afterwards against the same three notes, one tick each.

When an agency or art director relays the notes

On agency shoots the client rarely types the request themselves. The art director translates, and that is where specificity is most often lost. A client says the product looks cheap; the art director writes "fix the look"; the retoucher guesses.

Two habits help. First, the art director should keep the client's original words on the note and add the instruction beneath it, so the retoucher sees both the intent and the action. Second, anything the client said that cannot be actioned should be turned into a question before it reaches the retoucher, not after a round has been spent on it. Conflicting instructions from several people are a separate problem, covered in resolving conflicting stakeholder feedback.

The retoucher is the person who pays for an unclear note, so it is worth giving them a way to push back inside the review rather than by phone. A short reply on the note, asking the closed question from the previous section, keeps the whole trail in one place and makes it obvious later who asked for what.