How Creative Agencies Speed Up Background Removal and Vector Conversion Through Outsourcing

As the digital world is more competitive than ever, commercial creative agencies are under constant pressure to deliver high-quality marketing campaigns with a quick turnaround and high volume. Clients demand quick turnarounds with no compromises on visual fidelity. Art directors and graphic designers need to make some adjustments to their daily workflow in order to accommodate these requirements. The number of steps involved in preparing images for the foundation work before any real design becomes feasible is one of the major challenges to this speed. Agencies can seamlessly incorporate outsourced background removal services into their workflow, cutting down on the time-consuming tasks of asset preparation. The in-house team will keep working solely on conceptualizing and can fast-track the project and deliver a high-quality campaign while bringing high levels of client satisfaction along the way.

Why Image Processing Tasks Slow Down Creative Agency Productivity

For those running a large campaign, design teams often receive masses of unpolished files every day that aren’t ready for the client. From a series of product photos captured in a studio that’s less than perfect to an old marketing piece that needs to be repurposed, the beginning of any project is plagued by simple formatting. Each minute spent by a senior designer painstakingly tracing around the hair of a model is a minute that is taken away from brainstorming and layout design.Every minute spent meticulously drawing clipping paths around a model’s hair, or trying to rebuild a pixelated brand mark without the help of a dedicated vector conversion service, is a minute that is stolen from strategic brainstorming and layout design.

This internal production limitation is more than a delay in delivery – it has a significant impact on agency profitability. A high billable rate for a creative person to make repetitive pixel level edits or just do the basic shape tracing is inefficient agency resource utilization. In addition, assigning top talent to routine masking tasks can cause a drop in employee morale, poor productivity, and attrition. For both the agencies’ margin and their own creative juices, agencies need to separate high level concept development from raw asset processing.

How Outsourced Vector Conversion Keeps Design Projects Moving

In addition to editing raster images, agencies often find themselves dealing with a nightmare scenario of assets that are not usable for their client’s brand. The same situation often occurs: a client asks to create a large billboard and sends a low resolution, heavily pixilated image of their company logo as a JPEG. That logo needs to be carefully retraced and re-created from scratch so it is sharp at a very large scale and doesn’t lose its resolution.

That’s where an external vector conversion service becomes a must have in today’s quick-paced and modern agencies. The agency won’t need to stop the entire design process and recreate the curves and anchor points in the illustration software, but can simply push that file to a dedicated external partner. The external team is only responsible for creating that jagged picture as a clear, infinitely scalable EPS or SVG file. The agency can sneak this particular geometric rendering job out of their internal workflow, ensuring that their designers always have clean, production-ready assets to work with, thereby eliminating friction and delay in the project.

Scaling High-Volume Image Editing with Outsourced Background Removal

For e-commerce clients, the amount of image processing that may be needed can quickly become overwhelming for a medium sized agency. Formatting thousands of individual product shots may be necessary for a new storefront to be created digitally. It does not matter if you try to do this work in-house, you’ll miss deadlines and end up with rushed and sloppy editing. But with a seamless integration with external background removal providers, an agency can efficiently remove backgrounds from large volumes of images in a single night.

At the end of the day, the agency’s project manager just aggregates the raw photos, passes them to the offshore production team and in the morning they get beautiful, web-ready PNGs isolated and returned. It’s an ongoing process that works around the clock, and it’s the top creative agency’s big secret. It guarantees that web writers and layout artists won’t ever report waiting for assets to build out web pages or catalogs. Professional background removal services ensures that all product images have the same edge, appropriate shadowing, and accurate dimensions, ensuring consistency and uniformity throughout a global e-commerce platform.

Key Benefits of Outsourcing Background Removal and Vector Conversion Services

The agency becomes very agile with the decoupled production model in which ideas are generated internally and processing assets is done externally. There are several aspects of the business that are affected by the transition. Combined with an external vector conversion service, there are significant benefits to using specialty image editors, which can literally alter the way an agency works. To appreciate the full implications of this change, look closely at the operational parameters that benefit from effective delegating of production:

• Unrestricted Scalability: Agencies can be certain that they’re not risking their finances by having to hire in-house production artists full-time who are available throughout the year, but may only be needed for a large seasonal campaign.
• Accelerated Turnaround Times: Working in different time zones means that client revisions and other tedious asset preparation can be finished during a night’s rest and be reviewed the following business day.
• Specialized external partners: When these repetitive tasks are outsourced to specialized providers, the cost of production per asset is significantly reduced and the agency can ensure that it maintains a much healthier profit margin on fixed-bid client work.

Conclusion: Build a Faster, More Profitable Creative Workflow

Speed is as gold in a creative industry, and agencies need to streamline their processes. Handling huge amounts of image masking, logo tracing, and such on your own is an antiquated system that hinders growth and robs resources. Integrating background removal services into their workflow allows creative companies to remove friction, minimize overhead, and enable designers to think on a grand scale. From creating thousands of photos for ecommerce and editing them to a high standard, to fine-tuning scalable brand elements, outsourcing is the best way to ensure that your work is completed quickly and at a high standard. As agencies look to a reliable partner to do the heavy lifting, they can rely on a partner such as Visuals Clipping to provide them with the precision, speed and technical expertise they need to ensure creative pipelines remain smooth and profitable.