Post-production is not one stage. It is a short chain of them, and most of the confusion about image editing comes from expecting a single tool to own the whole chain. Photoshop sits near the end of that chain, not at the start, and knowing where the handover happens makes a brief far easier to write.
The chain, in order
1. Capture
Everything downstream is cheaper when the file arrives right. Consistent lighting, a locked-off camera, a grey card in the first frame, and a colour target once per setup. None of this is glamorous, and all of it saves hours later. A shoot that drifts half a stop between the morning and the afternoon turns a batch edit into four hundred individual decisions.
2. Raw conversion
This is Lightroom or Capture One territory. White balance, exposure, lens correction and a base colour profile get applied to the whole shoot at once. The goal is a neutral, consistent starting point – not a finished image. Work done here costs a fraction of the same correction made later, because it applies to every frame in a single action.
3. Selection
Somebody decides which frames go forward. It sounds trivial and it is routinely the biggest source of wasted retouching budget: images edited to a finish and then never used. Cull before you brief, not after.
4. Pixel work – where Photoshop lives
Now the per-image decisions begin. Cut-outs and masking, dust and blemish removal, shadow construction, ghost mannequin joins, compositing. These need judgement on the individual frame, which is precisely why they cannot be batched and why they carry a per-image price.
5. Output
The same finished image usually ships in several forms: a large sRGB JPEG for the product page, a square crop for a marketplace, sometimes a CMYK conversion for print. This step is mechanical and should be automated. If someone is exporting sizes by hand, that is a process problem, not an editing one.
Where briefs usually go wrong
Two mistakes come up repeatedly.
The first is asking for global corrections at stage four. “Make them all a bit warmer” is a raw-conversion instruction. Applied in Photoshop, image by image, it costs many times more and lands less consistently.
The second is leaving output specifications until after the edit is approved. Background colour, canvas ratio, margin around the product and file naming all affect how the pixel work is done. Changing them afterwards can mean redoing it.
What to send with a batch
A workable brief names the output specification, points at one approved reference image, and says which corrections are in scope. That is usually enough. Everything else – the tool, the technique, the order of operations – is the retoucher’s problem, and should be.