You wrapped a product shoot at our Montreal studio yesterday. The strobes are packed away, the products are back in their bubble wrap, and you walked out with a coffee and a polite handshake. So why are the final files still a week away? In our experience, this is the moment most first-time buyers feel out of the loop, because the part of product photography that determines whether your images actually convert on Amazon or Shopify mostly happens after you leave the room. This guide walks you through every stage your photos pass through between the last shutter click and the moment a Dropbox link lands in your inbox, written from the perspective of how our Montreal team actually runs the pipeline.
If you have not been through the earlier stages of the buyer journey, it helps to read about the portfolio review stage you went through before booking, and a recap of what happens during the shoot itself. This article picks up where the camera puts down.
Step 1: Selection and Culling, or Which Frames Survive the First Cut
A typical e-commerce shoot day at our Montreal studio produces somewhere between 400 and 1,500 raw frames per product, depending on how many angles, lifestyle variants, and lighting setups we ran. Most of those frames will never see daylight. Selection is the first quiet decision the studio makes on your behalf, and it shapes every conversation that follows.
We usually start by importing the day’s RAW files into Capture One or Lightroom and stepping through them in pairs. Frame 217 versus frame 218 of the same packshot might look identical to a buyer scrolling quickly, but one will have a sharper micro-contrast on the label edge and the other will have a stray dust particle floating two centimetres above the lid. We pick the cleaner one. Multiply that across 1,200 frames and the selection round alone can take a senior retoucher a full afternoon.
What you should expect to see at the end of culling is a curated set of “selects” that is typically four to six times the number of final images you contracted. If you booked twenty hero shots, we are usually showing you eighty to a hundred and twenty selects for approval before we touch retouching. That ratio matters: too few selects and you have no choice if you dislike the first pick, too many and the approval round itself becomes a job.
Step 2: Color Management and White Balance, or Why Your Photographer’s Monitor Matters
Before any retouching begins, we calibrate. Color management is the least glamorous part of post-production and the one that quietly ruins more product launches than any other technical failure. If our monitor is reading your navy-blue packaging as a slightly warmer navy, every downstream decision is now compromised, and you will only notice when the boxes show up looking off against the website image.
Our Montreal studio runs hardware-calibrated displays profiled to the sRGB color space, because that is what Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, and almost every browser on a customer’s phone is going to render in. We re-profile monthly, and we shoot a color checker target during setup so each batch can be neutralized against a known reference. If you ever receive proofs that look gorgeous on the studio’s preview but flat or oversaturated when you open them on your laptop, the most common culprit is a mismatch between our calibrated workspace and your uncalibrated screen, not a flaw in the file.
A practical request you can always make of any product photographer: ask whether they deliver in sRGB or Adobe RGB, and whether the files are tagged with an embedded ICC profile. The right answer for almost every direct-to-consumer brand is sRGB with the profile embedded. Adobe RGB is wider but most marketplaces strip it on upload, and untagged files render unpredictably on iPhones.
Step 3: Retouching Rounds and What a Montreal Studio Includes vs Bills Separately
Retouching is where post-production budgets actually live. The selection round is unbilled internal work, the color management is overhead, and the file delivery is mechanical, but retouching is hours of human labor and that is what you are paying for.
In our experience, most Montreal studios bundle a baseline level of retouching into the shoot fee. That baseline usually covers exposure and white balance correction, removal of obvious dust and lint, minor color correction to match the product to its real-world finish, and basic background cleanup if you shot on a sweep. What it almost never covers is liquify work to reshape soft packaging, frequency-separation skin work on a hand model holding your product, deep label reconstruction if the printing was off, or compositing the same product onto a different background.
The honest way to budget for this is to assume that anything the camera could not capture cleanly will be billed as additional retouching. Much of that billable time is avoidable upstream — the prep work that saves edit hours later is overwhelmingly about presentation choices made before the SKU even leaves your shelf. If your bottle has a label that wrinkled during the shoot, fixing it is composite work. If your fabric has a colored thread that does not belong, fixing it is brush work. We typically quote that kind of work at a per-image rate before we start, so there are no surprises at invoice time. Ask for a written list of what is and is not included before the shoot day, not after.
Step 4: Background Cleanup and Marketplace-Ready Variants
Most product brands eventually need three different background treatments of the same hero shot. Amazon and most marketplace listings require a pure white background, technically RGB 255 across the field, with no shadow bleeding into the edges. Shopify product pages often look better with a soft natural shadow on a near-white background, because the shadow grounds the product visually. Social and lifestyle uses often need a transparent PNG so the product can sit cleanly over any colored hero section.
Each of those is a separate output from the same source frame, and producing all three takes more work than producing one. At our Montreal studio we usually deliver the pure white version as a 255 JPEG, the natural-shadow version as a JPEG at the brand’s preferred background tone, and the transparent version as a PNG with a clean alpha channel. If you are also running on a marketplace with a strict pixel-dimension requirement, we will export at that specific dimension rather than asking you to resize the file yourself, because resizing in Preview or Photoshop without the right resampling will soften edges.
A common mistake we see brand managers make: ordering only the pure white version because it looks “cleanest” in isolation, then realizing two months later that the same shot on the homepage hero looks flat without a shadow. If you are not sure which variants you need, our suggestion is to think about where each image will appear before delivery, not after.
Step 5: File Formats and Delivery, or Which You Actually Need
This is the question first-time buyers ask most often, and it deserves a real answer rather than a list of acronyms.
If your team is approving deliveries from outside Quebec, the secure handoff and color-managed proof side of file delivery is covered in our remote workflow guide for out-of-province brands.
JPEG is what you want for almost every web use. It is compressed, it loads fast, it is universally supported, and at quality level 10 or higher the compression artifacts are invisible to a customer’s eye. If your photographer is delivering JPEGs in the sRGB color space at the marketplace’s required pixel dimensions, you can upload them directly. We deliver JPEGs at quality 11 in Photoshop terms, which keeps the file small enough for a Shopify product page but preserves every detail you paid for.
TIFF is what you want if your images are going into print catalogues, packaging artwork, or anything destined for a press. TIFFs are uncompressed or losslessly compressed, they carry more color information per pixel, and they can hold an alpha channel cleanly. If your brand is also producing physical print collateral, ask for a TIFF version of your hero shots delivered alongside the web JPEGs.
PNG is what you want when you need transparency. PNGs are the right format for any product image that will sit on top of a colored or patterned background on your site. They are larger than JPEGs, so do not use them for every product page image, but they are essential for hero sections and email headers.
RAW files are a more nuanced conversation. The RAW file is the original sensor capture, before any interpretation. Most Montreal studios, including ours, do not deliver the RAW files as part of a standard package because the RAW contains every cull and every rejected frame, and because the RAW is the working document the retoucher is editing against. If you specifically need the RAW files for a future re-edit or for archival reasons, that is a usage-rights conversation to have before the shoot, not after delivery.
Step 6: Revisions and Change Orders, or How Many Rounds Are Standard
The honest answer is two. Almost every reputable product photography studio in Montreal includes two rounds of revisions in the shoot fee. The first round is your reaction to the initial proofs, where you flag the things you want adjusted: this shadow is too deep, that label is rotated three degrees, this color is reading more warm than the actual product. The second round is your sign-off pass, where the retoucher addresses your first-round notes and you confirm the result.
In our experience, two rounds is enough for buyers who knew what they wanted before the shoot. It becomes tight for buyers who are still discovering their visual brand during the project, and in those cases we usually have a conversation early about whether a third round should be quoted as a change order or whether the original scope was under-defined.
What counts as a “revision” is also worth pinning down. Adjusting a shadow or rotating a label is a revision. Asking us to re-composite the product onto a different background after sign-off is a new deliverable. Asking for an entirely new angle that was not shot is a re-shoot, not a revision. Reputable studios will be specific about which bucket your request lands in, and so will we.
Step 7: Final QC and Sign-Off, or What to Check Before You Approve Delivery
By the time files reach you for final approval, the studio has already done its own quality control pass. We zoom into each image at 100 percent and look for stray pixels, soft edges where the cutout should be crisp, color casts that survived the calibration, and dust that crept back in during the retouching round. Even so, the buyer-side QC pass matters, because you know your product better than we do.
What we recommend you check before approving: open every file at 100 percent zoom on a calibrated screen if possible, or at minimum on a single consistent screen rather than across multiple devices. Look at the product’s true color against the photo, ideally with the physical product in your hand under daylight. Check the label text for legibility at the smallest size the image will appear on your site, not at full resolution. Confirm the file dimensions match what your platform requires, and that the file names are something you can use in your asset management system rather than IMG_4471.jpg.
One quiet thing that catches brand managers off guard: the image that looks perfect at 2000 pixels wide on a desktop preview can look noisy or oversharpened at 800 pixels wide on a mobile product card. If your customers are mostly shopping on phones, ask to see the small-version export, not just the master file.
What This Looks Like in Practice: A Typical Montreal Studio Timeline
For a standard direct-to-consumer e-commerce package of twenty hero shots, the post-production timeline in our Montreal studio usually runs about seven to ten business days from shoot wrap to final delivery. Selection takes a day, color management and the first retouching pass take three to four days, the first proof round goes out at the end of that window, you have a few days with the proofs, and the second round closes the file. Larger projects with composite work or lifestyle scenes can run two to three weeks, and rush turnarounds are possible but usually carry a surcharge because they displace other clients in the queue.
The reason we walk buyers through this in detail is that the post-production phase is where most of the friction in a product photography project actually lives, and almost none of it is visible until you are inside it. Knowing what each step costs in time and money, what is included by default, and what counts as an add-on lets you brief the next shoot with confidence rather than crossing your fingers. For teams whose post-production handoff feeds back into agency-led brand photography work in Montreal, that same confidence carries straight into how the next campaign brief is written. That, in the end, is what separates a one-off transaction from a working relationship with a studio you can call again.
If you want to read about industry-standard color profiles in more depth, the sRGB specification on Wikipedia is a reasonable starting point, and the International Color Consortium profile library documents the embedded ICC profiles your photographer should be tagging files with.
