Photographing a wedding is a huge undertaking. It typically takes 12 or more hours of coverage, during which you have to be creative nearly every minute. Wedding photography doesn’t end after the wedding day is over. The next step is editing and culling. This is probably why event photographers devote the majority of their time. It’s also the job they enjoy the most. Retouching businesses are available and may lighten the load the burden, if not eliminate that aspect of the task completely. I decided to switch to retouching for my wedding business and I’m sharing my experiences with you in this article, as well as the reasons you ought to give it a shot also.
Why Outsource?
In the first few years of business, we tend to manage everything on our own and in a rational way at least that’s what we believe. We don’t have enough cash for hiring anyone, but we do want to be educated, and usually we think that no one else could be better than we do. But all of these excuses aren’t the truth.
The aspect of money is likely the most debatable. The hours you spend editing or retouching are valuable time that you can’t use to find new clients to fill your schedule or behind the camera slaving away for a client or developing your abilities. At less than 300 dollars, you can have your wedding taken care of and edited and ready to be handed over to the brides and grooms. If you’re not a speedy, I’d say the same task could consume at least two full days. Imagine what you could accomplish in two days including how many venues you could contact to inquire about recommendations or blogs you can have ready to enhance your SEO and what number of email messages you would mail out to potential clients or the number of books or videos you could watch or read to gain knowledge and improve your skills. These are all things that wedding photographers typically do during their off-season; however, what if you were able to be able to do them all year and still take on many more clients, making more money and having more time to relax?
What is the reason I am so certain? I offer retouching of portraits, and I often find that my editing skills are more precise and reliable on images of other people as opposed to my own. It’s much easier to identify and admit the flaws in an image if it’s not yours, and therefore, it’s much easier to fix. I personally had to take quite long to reach this realization, or to at least admit it. It’s not easy detaching ourselves from the “cherished images,” but when you’ve tried it, you’ll will never look back.
Choose the Right Company for You
Outsourcing should help free more time to focus on other tasks. However, it should also be about getting your work to the highest stage. That means you have to locate an editor or a company who you can talk to easily, who is able to adapt to and enhance your style and with whom you can count on. If you choose to consider outsourcing, it might be beneficial to look into this top 25 editing services for photos to evaluate their work as well as their turnaround time, pricing and how you can place your order.
Although I haven’t tried every wedding retouching business available, I’ve tried some in the past before settling on the most suitable combination. These are the ones I have to date.
RDFL
RDFL is my first company that I worked with. Communication was great, and the turnaround time was consistent and speedy (less than 10 working days). The price is determined by the number of images that are submitted to be edited, and culling is affordable ($50 or less for up to 55,000 pictures).
It took around two or three weddings to get my pictures to look exactly the way I wanted them to. After that, everything was perfect. I ceased working with them because of two reasons. The first reason was that I changed onto Capture One and thought, “I could do it better myself.” The second reason was that there were a couple of times I had made specific demands (no detail photos that were black-and-white, for instance). However, as the Lightroom catalogs were returned, the requests I had made were not being followed. However, I’ll point out that every time, they made corrections to their error without cost.
