One of our fastest retouchers Oleg agreed to share his experience. Here’s an interview with him. His specialty is jewelry retouching.

– Hi Oleg! It is always great to see examples of people who have achieved some outstanding results, they inspire others to new achievements. Now as I understand you manage to make about 300 products per month on average (about $ 1000). That is, even if you work 30 days a month, it’s still about 10 products a day. Is it correct? Please tell us how you manage to achieve such speed, because many retouchers spend much more time on one product.

– In general – yes, the calculations are correct. Of course, the products are very different, sometimes you come across a complex batch, and you make it much longer, but there are also simple products. For example in my experience it turns out to make 20 products of the same chains a day, it takes 30 minutes for a photo to make simple rings. But on average, about 300 products per month really come out.

To do it quickly, you need to automate everything that is possible. Of course, first of all, I set up all the tools I needed for myself. Now I have tools available by pressing keys, which are also nearby, and I quickly switch between them. The next step was the development of actions. Since the processing of any product consists of many routine operations, I tried to add an action for each operation I need. I also use the same elements of different products and, whenever possible, I replace the areas with a similar finished one.

– Can you tell us a little about yourself: how did you start working with jewelry, what were the difficulties? Why jewelry retouch you prefer? How fast did you do it then? And finally, how long did it take to reach the current speed level?

– In general, it’s hard to remember how much time it took to make one product and with what quality it was possible to make them then. And I started three years ago. Actually, jewelry retouching at the Light Catchers was my first experience with jewelry processing. Then it seemed that it was all very difficult and very long. One product could probably be made for a day, especially with modifications. However, skills gradually grew and the process improved. And a year later it turned out to be around 150-200 products per month. And at the end of 2017, somewhere I reached the current level, although this is all relative, you gradually improve anyway and change the process in detail, refine it and the speed continues to grow.

– In summary, what advice would you give to novice retouchers so that they can achieve your success?

– In short – without experience, no matter what advice you are given, you have to go through all this yourself. You need to learn how to work quickly, this, like the skills to quickly move the mouse, and automation, which I have already talked about. That is, all the time to look for ways to quickly do all the stages of work. You can, for example, save everything that has been done and look for ways to reuse different parts of the product.

And a few comments from me personally. Oleg has developed his own style of work, which consists in decomposing the original product into many small parts. What does it give him? First of all, he does not care about important joints, that is, all these areas along the contour remain sharp, and you can work with them with less attention and quickly. And of course the method of using a mix brush together with the creation of a vector path gives a clean work of mix brush without flaws.

Of course, the ideal work in product retouch is always individual and this approach is not suitable for advertising retouching, however fast and high end retouching especially with a good source after a subject shooting of jewelry is what you need here.