current rate to outsource raw conversion/basic PP?

mmmatt

Hello all,
What is the going rate for basic conversion, RAW > JPG if somebody wanted to do the cropping/retouching/creative touches themselves? A local wedding photographer wants me to help her catch up. She is between 2000 and 4000 shots per wedding (her and a 2nd). I wish I could say I like doing this stuff, but i also wish I could say I was so busy with my own work that I don't have time. But allas I have the time and need the dough!

Anyways curious on what going rate is.

Thanks in advance.
Matt

davidweaver

If you're really good at it then 35-40 bucks/hour. If you're not so good at it then 15-20 bucks an hour. I'm really good at it and can knock out between 30 and 40 images an hour. That is from selection in bridge to final cropped, corrected and sharpened image saved and uploaded to my editors. Or a buck per final image for things less than 8x10. If it requires extensive work (WARNING: Creative touches = expensive time) then it is a different pricing structure for retouching work is applied. Bigger images require more care too.

Also no one provides (or should provide) 2000 images to a bride. You will get about 50-200 final shots out of this. Isn't the photog using some kind of proofing (triage) in the workflow? If you have 500 pics in the batch that are a half-stop underexposed and a bit too red you would just develop one setting for that then apply it to the bulk of the pics. Then you would offer the bride the ability to select. The the bride selects the pics she wants and then you knock them out with 'creative touches'.

Hope that helps!
David

mmmatt

davidweaver wrote:

If you're really good at it then 35-40 bucks/hour. If you're not so good at it then 15-20 bucks an hour. I'm really good at it and can knock out between 30 and 40 images an hour. That is from selection in bridge to final cropped, corrected and sharpened image saved and uploaded to my editors. Or a buck per final image for things less than 8x10. If it requires extensive work (WARNING: Creative touches = expensive time) then it is a different pricing structure for retouching work is applied. Bigger images require more care too.

Also no one provides (or should provide) 2000 images to a bride. You will get about 50-200 final shots out of this. Isn't the photog using some kind of proofing (triage) in the workflow? If you have 500 pics in the batch that are a half-stop underexposed and a bit too red you would just develop one setting for that then apply it to the bulk of the pics. Then you would offer the bride the ability to select. The the bride selects the pics she wants and then you knock them out with 'creative touches'.

Hope that helps!
David

david that helps immensely! thak you so much. I also was surprised she gave me the whole set, but she still wants to have creative control so she will go through them all anyways. She said that I could delete the ones that suck but I don't like to do that unless they blatently suck.

Compared to many people here I am average at best, but compared to her I'm the friggin god of raw conversion. I do batch like you are talking about. I pull images out of bridge in groups based on where they were shot so that I can batch white balance, channels and exposure, etc, then go through them one by one and tweek.


thanks again!!!

Matt

davidweaver

Hi Matt,

You should ask her to cull the bad shots. At a buck an image or even $0.50 it will take all her profit out of the shoot if you do thousands of images.

Cheers,
David

mercphoto

davidweaver wrote:

Hi Matt,

You should ask her to cull the bad shots. At a buck an image or even $0.50 it will take all her profit out of the shoot if you do thousands of images.

Cheers,
David

Agreed. Using your rates at the low end, $20 per hour and 30 images per hour is $1.50 per image. At 2,000 images that's $3,000 to you just for conversion. I really don't think the photographer fully understands what is being asked of you, or isn't bothering to do the math.

zweiblumen

mercphoto wrote:

Agreed. Using your rates at the low end, $20 per hour and 30 images per hour is $1.50 per image. At 2,000 images that's $3,000 to you just for conversion. I really don't think the photographer fully understands what is being asked of you, or isn't bothering to do the math.

Don't mean to nitpick, but $20/hr and 30 images/hr works out to be $0.66/image. 2,000 images would cost $1,333.33. Still more than she is probably looking to spend, but not as bad as $3k.

mmmatt

Thanks for all the advice guys. she is going to try to boil things down to 500-1000 images before they get to me and I'm just charging her a flat rate of $250. She is giving me 6 total, so It will keep me busy for a couple months. I'm hitting her for $.25 per image over $1000, and if there are PITA shots whe wants me to fix, then she will throw down some more.

Matt

davidweaver

At least you will gain some practice at those rates (Ahem...WAY TOO LOW...IMHO). If it helps, you can, internally, write off the difference between the real rate you should charge and what you are charging as an 'educational/training' cost.

davidweaver

zweiblumen wrote:

Don't mean to nitpick, but $20/hr and 30 images/hr works out to be $0.66/image. 2,000 images would cost $1,333.33. Still more than she is probably looking to spend, but not as bad as $3k.

McEconomics :-)
I was pointing out that the less capable you are the less you make. I didn't want to get into the non-linear distribution of price-performance for creative work. Which is: The better you are the more of a premium you can charge over the linear sloped rate.

Blessed or Damned with an MBA and 40 years of shooting experience.
David

mmmatt

davidweaver wrote:

At least you will gain some practice at those rates (Ahem...WAY TOO LOW...IMHO). If it helps, you can, internally, write off the difference between the real rate you should charge and what you are charging as an 'educational/training' cost.

yeah... it is low, but it is a fair amount of work for me, and I shoot through them pretty fast. It is just basic exposure and white ballance with batch shapening and noise reduction. I can do 1000 in 10 hours work, so $25 per hour is OK. She is also someone who is a friend and a very well know local wedding photographer who has to turn down business each year and will send some my way. Getting used to their gear has been a learning experience. My stuff is easier to work with and shootin a 5d with mostly L-glass it is all very consistant in terms of contrast, color, etc. Their Nikon stuff is very different, but once you are used to it the fixes are still easy.


Matt

Zanotti

mmmatt wrote:

yeah... it is low, but it is a fair amount of work for me, and I shoot through them pretty fast. It is just basic exposure and white ballance with batch shapening and noise reduction. I can do 1000 in 10 hours work, so $25 per hour is OK. She is also someone who is a friend and a very well know local wedding photographer who has to turn down business each year and will send some my way. Getting used to their gear has been a learning experience. My stuff is easier to work with and shootin a 5d with mostly L-glass it is all very consistant in terms of contrast, color, etc. Their Nikon stuff is very different, but once you are used to it the fixes are still easy.


Matt

I2E?


Andy always boasts about colour science programs. I have them and have been very favorably impressed. It would be relatively simple to color correct and lightly sharpen all you photos in a hour.

Its not perfection, but its better than most can PS. Cropping would be additional, but it is a simple solution.


Z

mercphoto

Zanotti wrote:

I2E?

Wow. That Photoshop plug-in is pretty cheap. I wonder if they'll have an Aperture plug in eventually?

mmmatt

Zanotti wrote:

I2E?


Andy always boasts about colour science programs. I have them and have been very favorably impressed. It would be relatively simple to color correct and lightly sharpen all you photos in a hour.

Its not perfection, but its better than most can PS. Cropping would be additional, but it is a simple solution.


Z

No. That is pretty slick little plugin though. I don't go out of raw unless I have to! I can only go that quick if there are groups of similar shots, like group portraits in the church for instance. I will sometimes link 10 or 20 photos in camera raw and then make all my adjustments on one of the images which makes the same adjustments to all that are linked. Then I go through and tweek each one if they need it. that obviously wouldn't work with unique images, but a couple dozen images shot the same way in the same place, from the same angle, with similar subject matter can be all adjusted similarly! I will clone out the ocasional sunspot if it is an otherwise nice image and do red-eye if I see it, but otherwise it is just the basics.

With weddings white ballance can even go pretty fast if you consistantly pick a well lit spot on a white wedding dress and warm to taste. Of course when you get 5 different light sources in the same image it is hell and I have no clue how to fix that, but it is "all about the bride" in wedding photography so that is how I do my post as well.

I don't know if this is the typical way to do things but it is how I do it and it seems to work well for me.

Matt

davidweaver

mmmatt wrote:

Of course when you get 5 different light sources in the same image it is hell and I have no clue how to fix that...

Matt

That's what B&W conversion is for. :-)

Also on I2E, many photo labs use a huge commercial version of the same technology in their image processing. I think EZ (is it still Smuggy's lab?) uses it. We used it at a pro lab I work at where we made prints for Dot Photo, Sony and many other retail B2C photo companies. It is the best of breed in large lab use.

mmmatt

davidweaver wrote:

That's what B&W conversion is for. :-)

That is the truth my friend!!!! Thank god b&w is in vogue these days... sometimes it is right for the shot and sometimes it is right for the shot because of crappy light.

Matt

aktse

mmmatt wrote:

No. That is pretty slick little plugin though. I don't go out of raw unless I have to!

I was told to get the stand alone version and have been very happy with it; IE2 works well for me for bulk jobs since it's quick, handles my RAW files and does a decently job. For any important photo, I go back and bring it into CS3.