Visuals are crucial in the fashion and apparel eCommerce industry, driving clicks and conversions and inculcating customer brand loyalty. For a fashion eCommerce business to flourish, crisp and high-resolution images, which capture the actual colors and textures of the product, are a must. The photos must be brand aesthetic and consistent across all channels. However, due to the omnichannel demands of seasonal launches and a never-ending Stock Keeping Units (SKU) list, meeting these demands in-house would be a creative and financial strain on the team.
Market Overview
According to Precedence Research, the E-commerce fashion industry is projected to be US$1.7066 trillion by 2034. Therefore, high-level visual content, which can be offered on all fronts, like the brand’s website and Instagram, is essential. With the new surge, outsourced image editing is becoming popular. Companies can now maintain visual appeal and freedom to divert their precious time and energy to brand storytelling, devise campaigns, or ideate brand campaigns instead of product-centric thinking.
Popular Image Editing Services Fashion Brands Use
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Background Removal & Ghost Mannequin Editing: Backgrounds to marketplaces and product pages must be clean, without any distractions. Ghost mannequin techniques achieve a 3D hollow effect and showcase a garment’s proper fit and structure without live models. This technology results in polished images while saving on the cost of photoshoots.
Color Correction and Consistency: For fashion eCommerce stores, a slight color mismatch will result in discontented shoppers and high return rates. Editing shadows, hues, and highlights to balance across all devices and lighting scenarios requires meticulous effort. Fashion retouchers can restore the true colors of the inventory images.
Retouching for Textures and Details: Textural retouching to garments must be subtle. For instance, experts can remove wrinkles, stray threads, lint, and creases that make the fabric look dull for shots with models, skin retouching, and lighting balancing brand-compliant finishes, while maintaining a natural look.
Advanced Edits for Campaigns & Social Media: Compositing, dynamic shadows, and product lifestyle images for lookbooks, ads, and reels are examples of advanced editing that many brands outsource.
Rich media edits and 360° product spins: Short product videos, 360° spins, and GIFs are all examples of interactive media. These rich media edits are valuable for showcasing items, allowing customers to view products from every angle. This builds confidence in buyers and reduces returns.
What are the Global Emerging Trends in the Editing Industry Points At?
Around the world, outsourced image editing technology is evolving as the digital shelf grows. Brands are no longer satisfied with basic edits. Companies now demand partners who provide industry insight, cutting-edge technology, and flexible workflows. This allows brands to stay ahead of trends and consumer expectations.
Change in Focus to Partners for Specialized Editing: Apparel and fashion brands now look to editing studios instead of generic outsourcing agencies. These studios have proven themselves in dealing with complex garment fabrics and style guides, making them industry leaders. These niche agencies provide brand teams focused on meeting brand specifications, which ensures consistency. Consistency is further guaranteed even with thousands of SKUs.
AI-Supported Editing and Automation: Automation tools are helping to make the editing process smoother by taking over tasks such as background elimination, batch retouching, and auto-tagging. While machines handle editing, brands gain cost savings and faster turnaround times. Human editors must step in where machines fail to execute detailed retouching and creative work that requires human touch.
Sustainability-Driven Editing Practices: Sustainability used to be a focus only a couple of years back, but it has now emerged as a strategic priority for many brands in the apparel industry. The overuse of reshoots is no longer a problem with brands editing and reusing photos for different platforms and campaigns. Image editing not only saves money and time but also helps reduce the frequent reshooting of photos, which in turn helps minimize constant production, which is good for the environment.
Hybrid In-House + Outsourced Models: Brands that quickly adapt to changes are now using a hybrid model, where the core creative direction and final approval are done in-house, while delegating high-volume, repetitive tasks to professional companies. The brand can retain creative control over the brand identity while also benefiting from the scale and speed that outsourcing provides.
Nearshoring and Regional Shifts: India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines continue to dominate the market for low-cost image editing services, but some companies are considering nearshoring associates in Eastern Europe and Latin America. For European and North American brands struggling with tight timelines, nearshore providers are particularly compelling because of their faster response times, shared time zones, and local compliance.
Top Outsourcing Destinations
India has been the go-to country for image editing services for many years, owing to their strong workforce, low prices, and efficient processes tailored to the fashion industry. The Philippines also enjoys some popularity due to its English language skills and its people’s customer focus. On the other hand, Eastern European countries like Ukraine and Poland are increasingly appealing, particularly to brands needing GDPR compliance, because of the shared culture and time zone, and the growing interest in these countries.
Is Your Brand Facing These Challenges
The benefits of scaling up image editing outsourcing come with challenges. Brands face rigid quality control standards and consistency issues when external teams work on thousands of images. When working with international teams, protecting copyright and file security when shipping becomes difficult. Meeting deadlines for seasonal launches or sales drives adds to the burden of meeting projected timelines. Unclear boundaries for workflows can lead to endless revision loops that weaken the efficiency of the brand as a whole. Remote collaboration is critical to strengthening trust with outsourcing partners and managing workflows effectively.
How Leading Brands Solve These Challenges
The most successful fashion and apparel brands collaborate with editing studios as an extension of their internal teams, which helps them not to outsource mindlessly. Brands build strong and nurturing partnerships.
To guarantee seamless partnerships, brands start by developing standard operating procedures, brand style guides, and rigid quality checklists to sustain brand identity. Clear expectations and upfront communication mitigate revision rounds. Understanding the product range, fabrics, and audience ensures accurate editing.
Efficient collaboration tools are essential. Secure cloud-based file sharing systems allow for sharing large files securely, tracking progress, and maintaining real-time approvals even in global distributed teams.
For maintaining brand compliance, partner vendors are onboarded only after qualifying pilot tests with regular maintenance reviews. Open communication, balanced SLAs, and timely performance appraisal systems help resolve conflicts and improve brand partnerships.
Editing, automation, and AI are increasingly being replaced by integration within editing systems. AI tools that perform batch tasks such as clipping paths and shielding drastically improve turnaround time. Human editors can focus on creative edits during the final stages, as machines cannot handle most of them.
Major brands set up strategies with several vendors to deal with seasonal spikes. Having approved partner backups ensures upscaling without jeopardizing delivery schedules, maintaining timelines, or compromising quality.
Future Considerations and Overall Thoughts
Seeing current trends, fashion and apparel brands must consistently embrace richer digital experiences by creating visual content. With the emergence of new technologies like generative AI, AR-powered virtual try-ons, and 3D immersive products, there will be a need for more editing skills and quicker editing frameworks.
Editing Partners must integrate more Advanced Systems to deliver the Types of Content Required to step into the Metaverse of Shopping.
To step into the Metaverse of Shopping, editing partners must increase their capabilities and deeper integration with client systems while having more advanced capabilities and agility. These new requirements can expand the range of services offered, provide more advanced client system integration, deeper capabilities with agile workflows, and the flexibility to create new formats that merge physical and digital shopping experiences.
Image editing for outsourcing is not just for cost-cutting. It focuses more on creating a brand image that meets customers’ expectations. Outsourcing image editing has added a new perspective on achieving agility in this ever-evolving digital space—no wonder the right editing partner can positively impact fashion and ecommerce leaders by driving strategic change.
