Senior Commercial Retoucher + Digital Asset Manager — Food / Product / CPG

First - please do not send us messages to our personal emails, work emails or social media. We will not read them and will immediately disqualify candidates. Thank you! We are Marmalade Grove, www.marmaladegrove.com, a 30-acre citrus farm in Ojai, California with award winning marmalades and fruit spreads. We’ve had features in Oprah’s Favorite Things as well as high end collaborations with customers like Hermes Paris. We are looking for an exceptional commercial retoucher who also has strong experience with Digital Asset Management (DAM), image libraries, metadata, naming conventions, version control, and production workflows. The level of photography we are talking about looks like Flamingo Estate: https://flamingoestate.com/ Trial photograph and reference attached. This is not primarily an e-commerce clipping-path or volume-retouching role. We produce high-end food, product, packaging, agricultural and editorial imagery and are looking for someone with the visual judgment to work at an advertising/editorial campaign level, while also helping us create a professional system for managing the entire lifecycle of our photography. The Retouching We are looking for sophisticated, natural retouching rather than images that feel overly polished or synthetic. Typical work may include: High-end food, fruit, glass, packaging and still-life retouching Color and tonal refinement Maintaining realistic fruit/food texture while correcting imperfections Product and label cleanup Controlling reflections, highlights and dimensionality Precise masking and compositing Background cleanup and tonal/color adjustments Subtle reshaping or reconstruction where necessary Matching a series of photographs so they feel like one coherent campaign Preparing master files as well as optimized derivatives for web, Shopify, social, print and other uses Maintaining consistency between photographs shot across different cameras, lighting setups and photographers Our aesthetic leans toward premium editorial still life rather than conventional e-commerce photography: rich but believable color, dimensional shadows, controlled highlights, tactile texture and subtle photographic character. Experience working with premium food, beverage, beauty, fragrance, luxury consumer goods or high-end CPG photography is particularly relevant. Digital Asset Management / Imaging Workflow We also need someone capable of helping us establish a rigorous long-term photography archive and workflow. This would include evaluating our existing image library and helping design: Folder / collection architecture File naming conventions Metadata and keyword taxonomy Product, SKU, crop, campaign and usage metadata RAW / working / retouched-master / derivative relationships Version control Selects and approval status Archival standards Color-management standards Photoshop master-file standards Web/export specifications Rights and usage information where applicable Searchable categorization Backup and redundancy strategy Rules for ingesting new shoots Rules for updating or superseding existing assets We want a system where someone can eventually search for something such as a particular product, fruit variety, packaging generation, orientation, campaign, season or image type and reliably find the correct current assets. You should be comfortable determining whether our needs require a dedicated DAM platform or can initially be solved through a carefully structured storage + metadata workflow. What We're Looking For The ideal person has: A strong professional commercial-retouching portfolio Exceptional Photoshop skills Experience with high-end food/product/still-life imagery Excellent color judgment Strong understanding of professional color-managed workflows Experience handling RAW files and high-bit-depth master files Experience creating and maintaining digital asset libraries Understanding of metadata, taxonomy, naming conventions and versioning Experience designing repeatable creative-production workflows Ability to think both aesthetically and systematically Meticulous attention to detail Experience working directly with photographers, creative directors, advertising agencies, premium CPG brands or retouching/post-production studios is a major plus. Initial Project The first phase would likely involve: Reviewing a representative portion of our existing photography archive. Reviewing several finished images to understand our visual standard. Retouching a small group of images so we can evaluate aesthetic fit. Auditing our current file-management approach. Proposing a DAM / archive structure and workflow. Establishing naming, metadata, master-file and export standards. Organizing and processing an initial portion of the library. Documenting the system so that photographers, designers and future team members can follow it consistently. If successful, this could become an ongoing relationship covering both image post-production and management of the photography archive. To Apply Please send: 1. Your portfolio Please specifically identify examples involving food, beverage, packaging, beauty, cosmetics, fragrance, glass, still life or premium consumer products. 2. Before/after examples Where possible, we'd like to see before-and-after retouching examples rather than finished images alone. 3. DAM experience Briefly describe a photography or creative-asset library you have previously organized or managed. Include: Approximate number of assets DAM/storage platform used Your role Naming/metadata system Version-control approach How final/master/derivative files were handled 4. Your recommended workflow In a few paragraphs, tell us how you would approach a library containing RAW captures, photographer selects, working Photoshop files, final masters, alternate crops and web/Shopify exports. 5. Your role in the work Please tell us whether you personally perform the retouching and DAM work or whether any portion is outsourced to a team. We are specifically interested in finding someone with both exceptional visual judgment and rigorous asset-management discipline, rather than simply finding the lowest-cost production solution.