Toptal: Professional Photoshop Artists
Headquarters: Remote
URL: https://www.toptal.com/
About the Role
Our client is building an open dataset of real, professional Photoshop work, published on HuggingFace under CC-BY-4.0, to evaluate how well AI systems understand creative editing. These are not synthetic tasks or staged demos; they are actual production work, done the way you already do it.
We're looking for working Photoshop artists across six disciplines to complete client-style briefs while a screen recorder captures the session. You work from a brief, you open Photoshop, and you do the job. Each task runs roughly 1–3 hours.
Your process is the product here. The layer decisions, the masking approach, and the moment you undo three steps to take a different route—that is exactly the signal this dataset is built to capture. If you've ever thought AI evaluation of creative work is shallow because the people building it have never actually retouched a beauty shot or built a matte painting, this is your chance to fix that.
Rate: $25/hr USD
Timeline
This is an extremely urgent role with work starting immediately. If you are interested and apply, please expect to be contacted and requested to complete your account setup on September 9th (Friday), 10th (Saturday), or the 11th (Sunday) to be considered for this role.
What You'll Do
- Complete Photoshop tasks from a client-provided creative brief, working at your normal professional standard.
- Run a client-provided session recorder for the full duration of each task.
- Deliver layered, production-quality PSDs along with final output.
- Work independently, at your own pace, within the scope of each brief.
- Contribute work that will be published openly for research use.
What You Bring
We're recruiting across six specializations and aiming for balanced coverage. Please identify your area of expertise:
- Matte painting / digital environments
- Key visual / campaign compositing
- Game & UI assets
- Print & packaging pre-press
- Portrait / beauty retouching
- E-commerce / product retouching
Hard Requirements
- Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later): You must have your own licensed copy of Photoshop. Intel Macs and Windows machines cannot be used for this engagement.
- Photoshop only: No Illustrator, Nuke, Blender, Procreate, or iPad workflows in the captured session.
- No generative AI: No Generative Fill, no Firefly, and no third-party generative plugins. All work must be manually executed.
- Individual contributor: No teams, studios, or subcontracted work.
- Open Licensing: Must be comfortable publishing work openly under CC-BY-4.0, meaning the resulting work and session data will be freely available for anyone to use with attribution.
- Portfolio: Demonstrable professional portfolio in at least one of the six categories listed above.