Professional Development Archives

This is an excerpt from the Professional Beauty Retouching course I created along with the Retouching Academy team.

Photo Retouching is a potent skill for all content creators. Retouching tools, emerging phone apps, and shortcut retouching software are very helpful for artists who only use retouching to supplement their main services such as photographers, makeup artists, graphic designers, social media managers, and so on.

However, for freelancers who offer retouching as their principal service, an additional understanding of career opportunities, tools, techniques, and business practices is necessary.

If you are interested in a professional retouching career, particularly serving commercial higher-paying clients, or if you are a photographer who provides retouching services to clients as well — this article is for you.

Several friends and colleagues have privately asked me if the MIT “Applied Generative AI for Digital Transformation” course was worth taking (it is quite expensive and intense) after I shared my certificate of successful completion. My answer is that it was definitely worth it for me in my quest to find the most impactful use of Generative AI for freelancers beyond image and video generation, though perhaps not as much as for many of my classmates who hold CIO or other digital transformation roles in companies across various industries worldwide.

Additional great benefit for me was reading submitted forum assignments and peeking into AI use cases for all sorts of purposes in business and education.

While the course covered a lot of ground that wasn’t directly relevant to my professional or personal goals, it did provide me with a strong foundation for what my intentions are, allowing me to continue confidently exploring how we, freelancers in visual content creation, can use AI capabilities and emerging tools to supercharge personal and professional growth, as well as take our freelance business to the next level.

If you’re curious about how Generative AI can benefit your business and professional development, let’s start with the basics today and explore its full potential together going forward.