It was Christmas. I was 500 kilometres from home, sitting in my wife’s parents’ house with a laptop open and 30 portraits that needed retouching. My wife was in the next room with her family. I had estimated eight hours of work ahead of me. — Jakub Kaźmierczyk @jakub.kazmierczyk
That was the moment Kuba decided something had to change.
The Real Cost of Manual Retouching
Most photographers who spend serious time on post-production know this feeling: a good shoot produces good images, and then the real work begins. Clone stamp. Frequency separation. Dodge and burn — manually, with a graphic tablet, 10 to 15 minutes per image minimum. Multiply that by 30 photos and you have a full day of work that follows you everywhere.
The creative part of photography like finding locations, working with people, reading light — that’s why most of us do this. Manual retouching is not that part. It’s meticulous, repetitive, and costs the same amount of time whether you’ve been doing it for one year or ten. The real cost isn’t measured in hours alone. It’s measured in everything else: the Christmas dinners you’re not at, the shoots you don’t want to schedule because you’re already behind on the last one.
The Discovery
During that holiday, photographer Unmesh Dinda from PiXimperfect posted a video introducing a set of AI retouching plugins. Jakub watched it, got curious and skeptical in equal measure. AI retouching tools, up to that point, had produced plastic skin — the texture disappears, the face looks rendered rather than real. Jakub as many had tried some and dismissed them.
But what he saw in the demo was different. The skin was cleaner. The imperfections were gone. It still looked like skin. So he installed the demo.
“I compared the AI result against 15 minutes of my own manual work — the way I always retouch. They looked nearly identical. I had pressed one button.”— Jakub Kaźmierczyk @jakub.kazmierczyk
The Purchase — In Three Stages
It was right after Christmas, and spending $300 on plugins wasn’t the obvious decision. So it happened in stages.
First: Heal. Removes blemishes and skin imperfections automatically, across the whole body, with texture preserved. Saved roughly five minutes per image on cleanup work alone.
Then: Dodge & Burn. Manual dodging and burning — painting light and shadow to create depth and dimension — takes 10 to 15 minutes per image by hand. The AI version processes in seconds and produces results indistinguishable from careful manual work at normal viewing size.
Then: Portrait Volumes. The step that adds three-dimensional depth to a portrait — the contouring that separates a flat face from a present one.
Total spent: approximately $300. Time saved on that first 30-photo job: approximately six hours. I finished in under two hours. Next holidays Jakub could enjoy with his family.
What the Workflow Looks Like Now
Post-production starts in Capture One: colour, tone, white balance. Files export as 16-bit TIFFs. Then Retouch4me runs — through Photoshop Actions for batch automation, through the Photoshop Panel for single images with layer control, or through Arams for sessions where Jakub does culling and retouching in one place without opening Photoshop.
Every result comes back as a layered file. Each plugin has its own layer.
“If the dodge and burn is heavier than I want, I reduce the layer opacity. If a mole was removed that should have stayed, the Heal layer eraser restores it in seconds. The AI does the work. I keep the final say over everything it did.”— Jakub Kaźmierczyk @jakub.kazmierczyk
he last step is back in Capture One: a grain pass if the image calls for it, then a single export run producing three file sizes simultaneously: social, high-res light, and full resolution.
On the ‘AI Means Plastic Skin’ Concern
This was Jakub’s own objection, and it’s the most common one we hear. The answer: AI retouching can produce “plastic skin” if you run everything at 100% intensity and don’t look at what it did. Retouch4me runs at adjustable intensity. Every result is a separate layer you can reduce, mask, or erase. The output is not a flattened JPEG — it’s a layered file that expects you to review and respond. But if you need, it can be simple in one JPEG too.
The graphic tablet has been off the desk for four and a half years for Jakub, but the quality of the work improved with the time spent on post-production dropping by roughly 80%.
Words based on a real shoot and workflow from Jakub Kaźmierczyk @jakub.kazmierczyk — commercial photographer and educator based in Wrocław, Poland.
USEFUL LINKS
→ Retouch4me for Beginners — where to start
→ Retouch4me Photoshop Panel — free download
→ Arams — free desktop app for batch retouching
→ Watch the full webinar on YouTube→ More free learning materials