No matter which business you are in, retail, eCommerce, real estate, product manufacturing, or photography, you would know the vital importance of high-quality photos. To ensure optimum quality, businesses must outsource photo editing to experts with extensive photo editing experience.
This blog will cover all the basics of the importance of photo editing, availing third-party agencies for photo editing jobs, the advantages it can bring to a business, the basic difference between image editing and retouching, and some other crucial aspects. Read until the end and find the answers.
Product photos are edited to entice customers, showcase the product features engagingly, and stay aligned with the brand identity. Real estate photos are edited to enhance color, remove unwanted shadows, and make the property look majestic, thereby acquiring more leads.
Wedding images, portrait images, fashion images are edited to make them look beautiful and appealing. Social media images are edited to make them optimized for the social media platforms, ensuring their formats, resolutions, and ratios are correct.
Photo editing has different objectives to fulfill the intended brand message, thus, improving sales conversions. Regardless of how brilliantly the photos are captured or how good they look during the photo shoot, they still need some editing to remove blemishes and spots, adjust colors, remove the plain background, fix red-eye, add shadows, and so forth.
To acquire more leads from the company website, social media accounts, eCommerce listings, and other media, brands must strive to showcase flawless images. Professionally edited photos increase brand credibility manifold, instilling a sense of trust and confidence among the target consumers.
This is the reason several companies outsource photo editing to professional agencies that have vast experience in high-end image post-processing across diverse industries. These professionally edited photos highlight the brand image and also give value to business owners.
Let us discuss some of the amazing benefits of outsourcing over maintaining an in-house team.
By taking the burden off your in-house team, you can better utilize them for other, more significant business processes. By outsourcing digital photo editing requirements to specialists, you can save a lot of resources on photo processing and editing. This will add up to savings on your operational expenditures.
Also, you don't need to hire extra professionals since you have access to a huge pool of experienced photo editors with the expertise to work with global brands.
Businesses can save a lot of money by partnering with a professional team, as they no longer have to buy expensive software licenses, equipment, devices, etc. Professional third-party teams work on high-end systems and the latest software by default.
Thus, no further extra expense on this account that will save up a lot of investment.
By spending less money on photo post-processing, you can see a significant increase in your return on investment.
Outsourcing agencies charge on a retainer basis, which is way less than maintaining a full-fledged in-house team or investing in expensive editing software. Besides, they provide the utmost quality with a quick turnaround. Thus, you invest less but get more value.
If you are a marketer and willing to do all the photo editing work by yourself, it will not only hamper your productivity, sanity, as well as mental health, but will also snatch away a good time that you could have otherwise invested in core business development areas. Outsourcing image editing will help you focus on developing your business activities.
Alternatively, if you are a professional photographer and are getting overburdened with culling thousands of images, editing them, and finally delivering them – think of outsourcing to a team of professional editors. They can not only deliver on time, but also significantly increase your TAT and productivity.
Marketers get to work with a comprehensive team of experts to consult on your project, suggest you better ideas, and come up with custom solutions that is otherwise a challenging thing, as often in-house teams or freelancers lack that level of expertise and skills.
Extremely technical editing techniques like clipping path, clipping mask, HDR photo editing, panorama stitching, color correction, reflection or shadow addition/removal, photo manipulation, and photo retouching – all these expert services are offered by these dedicated teams.
So you have decided to outsource photo editing tasks, but how much should you pay the newly hired team? Will it be worth the investment? What value can you get out of it? Let’s find out.
If you require just some basic cropping, color adjustments, and shadow corrections, the pricing starts from $0.10 – $0.30/image. These types of edits do not take more than half an hour, so your dedicated team can deliver them within the same day. The pricing mentioned is just a ballpark estimate and not a fixed one.
If your business requires more technical alterations in the images, which will take around 1-2 hours to do the job, your team may charge you $0.50 – $1/ image. This is the ballpark pricing, which can vary from agency to agency.
The types of editing included are improving white balance, stretching or removing/replacing the background, fixing perspective issues, lens distortion, etc.
This level of editing can take more than 2 hours up to 5 hours, depending on the number of images to edit.
This includes layer adjustments, clipping path, panorama sticking, HDR photo blending, ghost mannequin effects, photo masking, 360-degree image retouching, spots, dust stains, blemishes, wrinkles removal from the subject, shape sculpting, etc., using photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, and the like.
For such advanced photo editing services, you could be charged anywhere between $2 – $5/ image. Again, this is just an approximate estimate, and nothing fixed; the final pricing depends on the complexity of your task, as well as on the agency you have outsourced.
Photo editing and photo retouching are often mistaken for synonyms, but the two have significant technical differences. Although both concepts are about altering and enhancing an existing image to make it look more appealing, from a professional photo editor’s perspective, they are pretty distinct. Let us break it down for you in simple terms.
There are unlimited choices of photo editing that businesses and professional photographers can outsource based on their requirements. Some of them are as follows.
This is the most critical aspect of finding the right outsourcing company for your requirement. Asking the right questions and doing a proper background check will determine the authenticity of an agency. Below are a few vital questions one may ask while searching for the right outsourcing partner.
See whether they have a reliable, hassle-free system to share your requirements, creative thoughts, rough drafts, feedback, etc.
Ask for their turnaround time. A professional team will usually have a quick turnaround time.
This will help you understand whether the team has the competency to work for you or not.
Prior work and a robust portfolio will attest to their expertise and the quality of their work.
Knowing the pricing is a must. That will help you to gauge your expenses and whether you should move ahead or not.
Make sure to ask this. Only with a real-time trial can you understand their delivery time, professional skills, and level of expertise.
How will you communicate with them? Over the phone, email, Skype, or any other digital media? Who will be your SPOC (single point of contact)? Ask all these initially to prevent any hassle later.
This will give you an idea of whether the agency is authentic or if there is something to cast doubt on. Most agencies will accept PayPal or Card payments.
Will they transfer the file via a secured host or a cloud system, or email them to you?
This question is essential. The formats they share the deliverables in will help you to serve your purpose. So whether you use the files for print or web-purpose, ask the formats they will share the files in.
Also, confirm with the contact person whether they can provide any format other than the standard ones they give.
Another vital question that should be on every business owner’s checklist. Ask this to ensure their handling of client confidentiality and data security.
See whether they will sign an NDA with you, entitling the copyright of the digital asset to you, and also whether they guarantee zero data breach or leak from their system.
Even with asking all the questions mentioned above, selecting the right outsourcing partner can be daunting. To help you with this, we have compiled a list of some of the top photo editing agencies you can team up with and get assured top-notch edited images.
All these agencies are notable for their own expertise and have carved a niche for themselves in the photo editing and photo-post processing industry, offering world-class Photoshop services with an ace. Their reliable service and competitive pricing have made them the go-to option for business owners and professional photographers alike.
Considering the immense competition and demand from consumers worldwide, business owners or photographers can't carry out image post-processing tasks on their own. At the same time, it is mandatory to showcase neatly and professionally edited images that grab the audience’s attention.
In this scenario, nothing is better than to outsource photo editing to a team of experts with years of experience and diverse industry knowledge, offering professional photo editing services. To grow your bottom line and expand your business, keep yourself free from mundane editing jobs; leave them to the experts so you can focus more on your core business areas.
Keep the comment section busy with all your valuable thoughts. We can discuss them in our next blog post. Till then, happy outsourcing!