Upscaling agents
Post-production automation
Manual retouch sat between generation and delivery, so I made post-production a step in the pipeline.
- Client
- A stock image library
- Discipline
- Post-production automation
- Scope
- Agent workflows
automated upscaling
detail enhancement - Year
- 2025
Two hand-offs between
generation and delivery.
Challenge
For a stock image library, manual retouch and upscaling sat between generation and delivery. Every frame crossed two hand-offs, one into manual retouch and one on to delivery, so the pipeline stopped at post-production and only moved again once the work was done by hand.
Post-production as
a step, not a stop.
Approach
I read the hand-off, not the retouch, as the problem. So rather than speed up the manual step, I moved post-production inside the pipeline: agents run an automated upscaling and enhancement pass as a step of their own, and no frame leaves for manual work.
I built it as a chain that runs on its own. A trigger starts the automation for each frame, an upscale pass and then a detail pass run in turn, and the result goes straight on to delivery, with a log recording every step for every frame.
Result
Manual retouch left the loop. Output now moves from generation to delivery without a hand-off, because upscaling and detail are steps the pipeline runs rather than work it waits for.
Client work is under NDA. This describes the pattern, not the internals.
