Outsourcing Post Processing

met

I was just curious how many dgrinners outsource their wedding post processing. I've decided to take on more weddings when asked. I'm not actively advertising, just more accepting word of mouth recommendations once I talk to the couple. I have my regular job, but I love photography and feel like I can do the work. Mostly the goal is to fund my expensive hobby and make a little side money for gadgets.

With that thought in mind I was thinking how I wanted to approach my model and workflow. I'm seriously considering outsourcing almost all the post with the exception of 50-75 images that I can't keep my hands off of for the blog sneak peek, etc. I thought I would process just enough images to still love it, while not getting bogged down.

I don't currently shoot with a second so I was calculating this would be about average for cost per wedding based on images I would probably deliver.

I was looking at shootdotedit.

Cost to cull: 2500 images x $.08 = $200
Cost to process: 500-750 images x $.29 = $145 - $220
Total cost for culled and edited images returned in about a week = $350-$400

I was thinking that if you charge for 4 hours in post for every 1 hour you shoot and are charging the client, then you are paying shootdotedit about $12.50 an hour for what you are making your hourly rate on.

Added Option:
Cost to upload directly to their Smugmug gallery ($22.50 - $35)

Benefits

• Most likely able to turn the images around faster
• Making money on your post processing
• Better quality of life

Cons

• Less creative control :cry

How many dgrinners outsource their post? If so, who does your work for you? Why or why haven't you done it yet?

Moogle Pepper

I am on the fence. On the one hand, I am not always entirely busy so for me it isn't as cost effective and I do like to cull and edit my own work. And on the other I can see not wanting to sit in front of my computer editing all the time.

I am playing wait and see. Though I doubt I would outsource it.

Art Scott

I go thru and cull my images, as I am the only one that knows what I and the client wants, then I send to (by FTP) HAPPY FISH for Lightroom work, their prices are very reasonable.......there is very little to be done past Lightroom processing on my work, but then I do not shoot 2-15K images at a wedding.......I shoot every wedding, portrait or whatever as if I were still shooting film, which for me is good as I do still shoot film, from time to time.....especially if a client asks......, if I get out of the habit then when I do go to a shoot with just a propack of film I would be in a world of serious hurt.
If a client wants lots of pixel work done, I would also send that back to Happy Fish.....

Click this link - Happy Fish Design - to request processing prices: fill out the top poprtion (your info) and skip to the message block and ask for a price sheet, they, Karen and Chad Dahlquist will be HAPPY to help.

I had to outsource my film and still do, but also time spent processing (film or digital) is time I could be shooting (daylight hours and early night) or sleeping (late night)..........it keeps me on track and on my delivery schedule......Happy Fish Processor (Chad) is also a PRO PHOTOG .......

met

I shoot PJ style, so I tend to take a lot of clicks.

I've decided that for the wedding I'm shooting later this month that I'm going to cull them myself and upload probably around 500 for shootdotedit to process and upload to my smugmug.

After looking at their examples, setting up my color profile, etc, I honestly don't think that I could process them any better than they could. I don't do a signature action or look anyway and I'm sure they are probably more efficient and capable in LR than me to tell you the truth.

I think it will just help me not get bogged down and feel like I can deliver in a more timely manner. I just don't want to lose the joy from what I actually love. I do love processing images, but when it gets down to that many - I start losing my joy in that as well. That's why I think doing 50 or so myself for the blog will be good.

I might do an experiment with a compare and contrast on how I would have edited it versus what I receive back from them. Maybe I'll post that later this month along with several images that they produced for me so everyone can see what they might expect from shootdotedit.

tenoverthenose

I can't imagine a time when I will outsource my images, here's a few reasons:

1. I learn from editing my images - a lot of my shooting is experimentation and I need to learn what works and what doesn't. This is incredibly important.
2. I edit each wedding to look unique for that wedding and there is no set standard across the board.
3. I can edit FAST - a full wedding (2k+ images) in 3 or 4 hours. I think I would waste more time offloading/shipping images for outsourcing.
4. I'm a control freak - I don't like the idea of someone else working on my images. It's not in my soul and it would feel weird in my business. If I could, I would love to build & bind my own albums - it's just who I am and my clients know it.
5. I learn from editing my images - a lot of my shooting is experimentation and I need to learn what works and what doesn't. I told you this is important.

Qarik

It doesn't make sense for me to to outsource post pcrocessing yet. I don't think it ever will for me.

1) I like editing. I learn from it.
2) I don't book enough weddings (and probably never will) that time becomes such a valuable commodity. If I am not editing then I would would be reading book or watching TV. If I ever got to a point where it was effecting time with my kids or taking away from my other responsibilities then yeah..I might outsource it.

Blurmore

Only 1 question....why oh why would you deliver 500-750 images? I've considered it, but for me...I'd cull myself to 200-300 images, and have them edit those.

marikris

I have been considering outsourcing for future weddings because otherwise I will constantly re-re-re-re-process images. Not to mention my eyes have been recently opened to the crap that it my laptop monitor. I would however, structure my pricing to include this (when I do it).

Qarik

met wrote: »

I think it will just help me not get bogged down and feel like I can deliver in a more timely manner. I just don't want to lose the joy from what I actually love. I do love processing images, but when it gets down to that many - I start losing my joy in that as well. That's why I think doing 50 or so myself for the blog will be good.

I hear you on losing "the joy". Here is my take on that. 1st of all of that is just part of the learning and you can't get around it. I have fully edited maybe 10K images in my career and culled another 30K. It was painful at times and quite a bore...but it has helped me immensely to create better/more consistent images and my efficiency has gotten so much better. I can knock cull/edit 500 RAW images from an event in about 4 hours now with very good results. Before it woudl take me all day and looking back at the results..they were not up to my current standards. In fact editing all those images helps me SOOC becasue I know what my editing flow is capable of and I can take risks or know what not to attempt.

Every image you edit adds to database in your head. You will get better and better doing it. But the improvemnts you will see are measured in the scale of thousands of images! It's a lot of work but it is so worth it. At some point when you develop your eye and know your tools..then there maybe a point of diminishing returns..go ahead and outsource if you want then. I suspect you have not reached that point though.

My advice? Keep editing until you get sick of it ..then keep editing until you are sick of it but you can do it asleep!

tenoverthenose

^^^ Truth

indiegirl

Qarik wrote: »

I hear you on losing "the joy". Here is my take on that. 1st of all of that is just part of the learning and you can't get around it. I have fully edited maybe 10K images in my career and culled another 30K. It was painful at times and quite a bore...but it has helped me immensely to create better/more consistent images and my efficiency has gotten so much better. I can knock cull/edit 500 RAW images from an event in about 4 hours now with very good results. Before it woudl take me all day and looking back at the results..they were not up to my current standards. In fact editing all those images helps me SOOC becasue I know what my editing flow is capable of and I can take risks or know what not to attempt.

Every image you edit adds to database in your head. You will get better and better doing it. But the improvemnts you will see are measured in the scale of thousands of images! It's a lot of work but it is so worth it. At some point when you develop your eye and know your tools..then there maybe a point of diminishing returns..go ahead and outsource if you want then. I suspect you have not reached that point though.

My advice? Keep editing until you get sick of it ..then keep editing until you are sick of it but you can do it asleep!

+1

BlueSkyPhotos

Blurmore wrote: »

Only 1 question....why oh why would you deliver 500-750 images? I've considered it, but for me...I'd cull myself to 200-300 images, and have them edit those.

200-300 from 10 hrs wedding would be a very low number, especially if there are two photographers. Anyways, I made a decision to outsource my post processing except the top 100 picks I will hand process. I don't want to spend another summer in front of the computer. I had 12 weddings last year (a lot of them in June and August), plus number of HS seniors and it got way too much. Keep in my that I have a day job as well.

Kinkajou

Also a day-jobber here and just not that great at getting the basics right... as Kris mentioned, I re-re-reprocess every image because they just never look 'right'. Huge time suck and I just need to decide whether developing a skill and skipping out on some sleep as a result or a couple hundred bucks is more important.... Not to mention that if I do the processing myself, it literally takes weeks and weeks because of my day job and everything else going on, and it would be nice to give my clients their photos in less than a month... two weeks would be fabulous for them

Art Scott

How many of you have to do all your own printing due to
your control freak fetish?????:D:D rofl

tenoverthenose

Art Scott wrote: »

How many of you have to do all your own printing due to
your control freak fetish?????:D:D rofl

I have actually done some fine art ink jet printing that I used in a matted album. I loved it. If it was anywhere near economically feasible for me to do my own printing I would.

Honestly if I could build my own albums I would probably do it - maybe not on every one, but I love to be involved with every aspect of my craft. It's just who I am, I want to understand everything.

met

I understand what you mean, Patrick. It would be awesome to have a personal hand in everything and enjoy the craft from start to finish. But I have my "real" job plus volunteer teaching work that I do every week and I'm just trying to figure out how to find a balance. I did set up a shootdotedit account and I'm going to give them a whirl for the wedding I'm photographing this upcoming weekend. If all else fails I'm out about $200 and it was a failed experiment. But I highly doubt that will happen.

It looks fairly split right now for those that could never give up their editing and those that are seriously thinking about it.

tenoverthenose

Molly it may be a good business and even economical decision for you to outsource PP. I just strongly believe that you will miss out on the greatest benefit - learning from your mistakes so that you do not repeat them. Also once you get your editing style down, you can edit MUCH faster than when you first start... it just takes practice.

Last Thursday I shot an elopement from 3-7. Drove back to my studio while importing 900 raw files from my CF cards into my laptop + rendering regular previews in LR. Arrived at studio @ 8, cracked a beer and culled 900 images to ~ 300 in thirty minutes. Spent one hour processing 300 images, uploaded them to a flash drive for clients and I was done with the job. Met clients the next day to deliver final products.

I work faster than outsourcing.

Moogle Pepper

tenoverthenose wrote: »

Molly it may be a good business and even economical decision for you to outsource PP. I just strongly believe that you will miss out on the greatest benefit - learning from your mistakes so that you do not repeat them. Also once you get your editing style down, you can edit MUCH faster than when you first start... it just takes practice.

Last Thursday I shot an elopement from 3-7. Drove back to my studio while importing 900 raw files from my CF cards into my laptop + rendering regular previews in LR. Arrived at studio @ 8, cracked a beer and culled 900 images to ~ 300 in thirty minutes. Spent one hour processing 300 images, uploaded them to a flash drive for clients and I was done with the job. Met clients the next day to deliver final products.

I work faster than outsourcing.

I uh... learned while doing my own PP some poses didn't work out as I thought it would have. Nixing that posing idea. +1 to doing it on your own.

Kinkajou

tenoverthenose wrote: »

Molly it may be a good business and even economical decision for you to outsource PP. I just strongly believe that you will miss out on the greatest benefit - learning from your mistakes so that you do not repeat them. Also once you get your editing style down, you can edit MUCH faster than when you first start... it just takes practice.

Last Thursday I shot an elopement from 3-7. Drove back to my studio while importing 900 raw files from my CF cards into my laptop + rendering regular previews in LR. Arrived at studio @ 8, cracked a beer and culled 900 images to ~ 300 in thirty minutes. Spent one hour processing 300 images, uploaded them to a flash drive for clients and I was done with the job. Met clients the next day to deliver final products.

I work faster than outsourcing.

Holy $h!t!!!!

How the heck can you work that quickly? Takes me hours upon hours upon hours and then I go back the next day and realize that I don't really like anything that I did and I spend another huge chunk of time redoing the processing again, and then I come back again the next day and they're sometimes ok, but a bunch still need some tweaking, then I'll need to bring a few into photoshop to fix some stray hairs or other details... seriously, working a full-time job and doing this in the evenings after work - it easily took me about 40 hours of time if not more to edit a 4-hour wedding shoot, less than 300 images delivered.

tenoverthenose

Kinkajou wrote: »

How the heck can you work that quickly? Takes me hours upon hours upon hours .....

Maybe I should do a full post on this for more details, but here's the quick version. Mind you I use a Motibodo board when I edit, so I never take my hands off of my keyboard (saves a few seconds an image, adds up quickly).

1. Shoot in auto white balance, unless you are doing something for effect. Our camera's today are pretty smart.

2. Process one image in Lightroom that will be a starting point for all other images. Nothing too crazy, just address warmth (through the use of split toning so as not to screw your previous auto wb), contrast, sharpness, maybe fill light if you like it. Save this as a present, for this example call it "Baseline".

3. When you import your images, make sure and apply the "Baseline" preset and and render standard previews. Now when you bring images into LR they will be 90% correct before you do anything else.

4. Set up LR in library mode (much faster than develop) to filter out all of your rejected photos (only show Flagged or Unflagged).

5. Arrow keys + X key are your only friends. Reject bad photos, reject everything but the best photos in a set (we don't need three shots of the bride smiling), reject OOF photos, reject photos that are blown out or way underexposed, reject, reject, reject. Every image you reject is one less to edit. This is where you need to move fast, if you have two images one of them has to be better than the other. Find the best image quickly. Now you have a lot less images to "correct". Along the way, you might want to star any real stand out images

6. Switch to develop mode and make adjustments for an image, then copy and paste it's settings to as many images that were taken in the same lighting as possible. Example: if you shot a bride getting ready in natural light in a hotel room, edit one image to look right and then copy those settings to the rest of the images you shot in the same room. Of course, you may not even need to do this at all if you started with your "Baseline" preset.

7. Repeat 6 for the various situations you encountered shooting.

8. Done.

Qarik

tenoverthenose wrote: »

Maybe I should do a full post on this for more details, but here's the quick version. Mind you I use a Motibodo board when I edit, so I never take my hands off of my keyboard (saves a few seconds an image, adds up quickly).

1. Shoot in auto white balance, unless you are doing something for effect. Our camera's today are pretty smart.

2. Process one image in Lightroom that will be a starting point for all other images. Nothing too crazy, just address warmth (through the use of split toning so as not to screw your previous auto wb), contrast, sharpness, maybe fill light if you like it. Save this as a present, for this example call it "Baseline".

3. When you import your images, make sure and apply the "Baseline" preset and and render standard previews. Now when you bring images into LR they will be 90% correct before you do anything else.

4. Set up LR in library mode (much faster than develop) to filter out all of your rejected photos (only show Flagged or Unflagged).

5. Arrow keys + X key are your only friends. Reject bad photos, reject everything but the best photos in a set (we don't need three shots of the bride smiling), reject OOF photos, reject photos that are blown out or way underexposed, reject, reject, reject. Every image you reject is one less to edit. This is where you need to move fast, if you have two images one of them has to be better than the other. Find the best image quickly. Now you have a lot less images to "correct". Along the way, you might want to star any real stand out images

6. Switch to develop mode and make adjustments for an image, then copy and paste it's settings to as many images that were taken in the same lighting as possible. Example: if you shot a bride getting ready in natural light in a hotel room, edit one image to look right and then copy those settings to the rest of the images you shot in the same room. Of course, you may not even need to do this at all if you started with your "Baseline" preset.

7. Repeat 6 for the various situations you encountered shooting.

8. Done.

pretty much exactly what I do..though I do a 1st cull the night of, 2nd cull the day after when my eyes are more fresh, and do a final cull after my eyes have seen the set a couple of times to make sure I capture all the critical event/people. I will keep images that are not my best if for example i didn't catch Aunt Helen in any other shot or only have 2 father and daughter dance shots that I realy like..I may keep a 3rd that I don't like as much just for the client.

The 1st cull maybe 1/2 the images. 2nd cull another 1/2 of what is left and last cull is maybe 10% of what is left.

The only other thing I do is go through my best best shots and give them extra love.

Total time? about 10 hours for 1300 images with 350 delivered or so.

Blurmore

Qarik wrote: »

pretty much exactly what I do..though I do a 1st cull the night of, 2nd cull the day after when my eyes are more fresh, and do a final cull after my eyes have seen the set a couple of times to make sure I capture all the critical event/people. I will keep images that are not my best if for example i didn't catch Aunt Helen in any other shot or only have 2 father and daughter dance shots that I realy like..I may keep a 3rd that I don't like as much just for the client.

The 1st cull maybe 1/2 the images. 2nd cull another 1/2 of what is left and last cull is maybe 10% of what is left.

The only other thing I do is go through my best best shots and give them extra love.

Total time? about 10 hours for 1300 images with 350 delivered or so.

I don't know how people cull night of, I need a break from looking at people, usually a 1 week break.

BradfordBenn

tenoverthenose wrote: »

Mind you I use a Motibodo board when I edit, so I never take my hands off of my keyboard (saves a few seconds an image, adds up quickly).

Is the Motibodo keyboard really that excellent? I have been thinking of a Gamer's Keypad (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001NEK2GE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=bradfordbennc-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=B001NEK2GE">Logitech G13 Programmable Gameboard with LCD Display</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=&l=as2&o=1&a=B001NEK2GE&camp=217145&creative=399349&quot; width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />) where I can assign key commands to the buttons on the controller to do the same thing and they are easily a magnitude less expensive.

met

After reading through various people's thoughts, opinions and personal workflows I decided to process the wedding I did this past weekend myself with the specific intent to find an efficient workflow. In the past I've always multi-tasked while processing - watching TV, etc. It was part of the way that I justified the time in my mind.

So here's what I decided to do.

• Everything was backed up and started being imported to LR before I left the venue.
• Only music - no TV or other distractions while processing.
• I'm going to record the actual exact amount of time it takes me to process this set.
• I'm a hands-on learn by doing kind of person. Which means, everything I know about photography and LR has pretty much been trial and error and experimentation. I'm buying a LR book because I know there are some powerful tools that I'm not using in it. (Case in point: The FLAG and SYNC tools. Never used them and they changed my life. lol) I can actually work very quickly on a computer with shortcut keys, so I decided to go in with the mindset of just learning them, bearing down and pushing through it.
• Create a timeline with deadlines for myself so I can't push it off. Have the goal to get the online gallery up within a week. I find that for myself, the longer I put it off - the worse it gets.

My rough workflow so far:

1. Backup everything on site.
2. Allow my files to import into LR while I'm traveling home.
3. Flag (Arrow + X - Thanks Patrick!) my discardables and be vicious about it.
4. 5 Star any that I want to use for my blog and process them immediately. Create an empty gallery and event on my Smugmug and post the details of how to register for notification when the gallery is uploaded in my blog post with the teaser. (In the future, I'm actually going to have this done before the wedding so I can have cards for the guests to pick up, so they can register for the event notification before I even do anything.)
5. Process a baseline for each subset at the different locations or lighting conditions. (1 color and 1 B&W).
6. Use the sync feature to apply that baseline to each subset and proceed.
7. Go back and make any little minor adjustments to each individual photo that needs tweaking.
8. 5 Star the subsets of photos that are 100% complete.
9. Rename while exporting and upload to my smugmug.
10. Send out the e-mail to everyone that has registered for the Event that the gallery is up.
11. Done. Woo hoo!

This wedding I did on Saturday I actually culled all the photos and did the blog post as soon as I got home and had it up that night. And because I processed some various ones for the blog, I synced all the getting ready and most of the portraits while I was at it. All I have left to process are the ceremony and reception. (I'm probably about 6 hours in so far - which includes my blog post.)

Here's my thread with the pictures from the wedding this past Saturday.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=195917

If I end up really doing this wedding photography thing regularly and get really serious about it, I may still outsource the workflow - but for now I guess I'm still going to stick with it as a thought in the back of my mind. I am still very curious to see how they would have processed the set. I was thinking I might send them a minimum order of a cross section from the day just to satisfy my curiosity.