Hi guys.I wanted to ask you this for a couple of weeks.Since I currently work with my 2 female neighbor friends on photo editing for micro stock sites last 3 years,they pay me around 1 dollar (sometimes more) for one photo.I have to deliver 50 photos per week,that means I have monthly slightly more that 200$ per month.That includes all the job you can make on the photo from face retouching to photo-manipulation attempt and so on.Since I didn't have a clue about all this stuff 3 years ago and my "training" was for about month or so,I was needed to know all this stuff later in my photo editing,along other stuff you need to find out yourself. So my question from beginning is how do you price your work and how I need to put price on mine work,if I decide to go solo one day? I know one of this girl,the girl who train me,is making "good money" but per photo and I guess she's got my "salary" for 1 or 2 weeks. Thanks in advance for your replies.
Retouching can be quite tricky pricing-wise. Micro-stock sites won't pay very much, and you won't get to good money until you work for a digital agency. I know one retoucher who works for a design agency and she makes about $400 per day. She does find the process pretty tedious and doesn't really like the monotony of it. If you go freelance, getting higher paid work can be a challenge because you'll be new. If you know of a photographer (or if you're a photographer yourself) then i would do a few edits for free and build up a portfolio of work. You can then put these on your website and get clients that way. As a photographer, i do all of my own retouching and i include basic post-production in my creative fee. this means colour-correction, cropping etc. If the client wants something more specific, then the price gets negotiated. This depends on the complexity (or tediousness) of the job. I once had to remove all of the pins and lint from a fashion shoot because they didn't finish the garments in time. I charged them $10 per photo and as there were around 70 of them, it worked out alright. although i'd hesitate to do that again because my music choice on edits 1-5 were Chopin and by the time i hit 70, it had moved on to Pig Destroyer. i'm not sure how useful this is as i can't really give you an exact pricing-structure, but starting to build a portfolio of work that you can show clients will certainly help get future work. i'm also pretty sure that you won't be able to use the edits from the stock-site on your site, so you'll have to do some off your own back. hope that helps a bit.
i think it depends on the quality of the work and the size of the picture ... my cheapest retouchers price is 50,-- € for retouching one picture (thats what i pay him for retouching a 40mp tiff 16 bit picture) ... no composing, only standard retouching work ...
Thanks for the reply's guys.So all in all I get almost nothing for all the work I need to do on one photo from cleaning to retouching.I knew they payed me so little.
Location is a huge factor, too. A retoucher in the US is going to be a great deal more than one in Asia. If/once you get 'good enough', you should be able to price work based on how long you expect it to take, and quote on a case by case basis.
@colorspace thanks for the reply mate.The main reason I was asking this is because I was needed to do everything even to design some elements for web,to watch how to edit animation and later to use Illustrator,like all other is not enough and all that for the small price.The main problem was that you are begin to learn something and all of the sudden you need to switch on something new even if you didn't learn the previous technique,beside all other stuff.
