Still Image Retouching and Finishing

This skill is for finishing existing still images. It assumes there is a captured, scanned, rendered, or composited source image and that the agent's job is to make production decisions about development, retouching, color, metadata, output, and review. It is tool-agnostic: Lightroom, Camera Raw, Capture One, Darktable, RawTherapee, Affinity Photo, Photoshop, GIMP, command-line processors, DAM systems, RIP software, and lab portals are possible instruments, but the skill's decisions are about craft and delivery rather than any one vendor.

Use it for:

• RAW intake, rendered-file intake, selects, versioning, sidecars, and handoff notes.
• Nondestructive development: exposure, white balance, tone mapping, lens corrections, local masks, snapshots, proof copies, layers, smart objects, adjustment stacks, and reversible repair.
• Color-managed finishing: working spaces, embedded profiles, monitor profiling, ICC soft proofing, rendering intents, output profiles, print proofing, and web/social conversions.
• Retouching: dust, sensor spots, blemishes, flyaways, fabric wrinkles, product cleanup, architecture perspective, food freshness, documentary limits, compositing cleanup, and client/legal review.
• Generative fill or AI repair decisions only as post-production interventions on existing stills, including disclosure, provenance, and rights notes.
• Sharpening, noise reduction, resampling, crop variants, batch consistency, metadata, accessibility metadata, export recipes, QA, and archive/delivery packages.

Do not use it for:

• Generating new images from prompts as the primary task.
• Choosing or integrating image-generation APIs.
• Video color grading, motion retouching, VFX shot work, or frame-by-frame video finishing.
• Campaign concepting, art direction, casting, styling, media buying, or platform growth strategy except where those affect still-image finishing constraints.