How Much Should You Pay/Invest in Professional Photo Editing Services?

Whether you’re a long-time professional photographer or someone relatively new to the business, there’s no doubt that you can benefit from digital photo editing services. It’s one thing to recognize that you probably should be spending more of your time doing work that’s of a higher standard and skill than photo color correction services or photo culling services, it’s another to take the initiative and utilize a professional photo editing company like Picsera to help you out with these more menial functions.

The first question many people ask when it comes to photo editing and retouching is typically “how much should I be paying/investing in digital photo editing services?” It’s a fair question and one with a variety of different answers depending on who you are and what you’re looking for.

Generally, a professional photo editing company divides up the services offered into various different categories for customers to choose from: culling, keywording, retouching, and color correction are some of the most common/popular of these.

Many companies, such as Picsera, will allow you to pick and choose from these services individually or package them together for even greater deals and price rates! First, let’s look at some of the services as standalone products and how much you can expect to pay.

For very basic, low skill level work like culling images, keywording, and renaming photos, you shouldn’t be paying more than a couple of cents per word/image. For example, Picsera charges $0.01 per word/image for keywording and renaming of photos. So even if you’re working with hundreds of photos for a particular shoot, you can expect to only have to invest upwards of a handful of dollars ($5 will afford you 500 pictures).

While paying for individual services can be a great way to get help on a one-off project or when you’re particularly overwhelmed with one aspect, a top tier professional photo editing company will offer packaged bundles for ease and convenience. At Picsera, we offer six different stress-free bundles to choose from for the busy professional who’s in need of multiple services.

The packages start at $70 and go all the way up to a $240 investment for someone that needs help sorting through literally thousands of pictures. In the grand scheme of things, even that $240 price tag is pretty small when you consider how much time you’ll save in the long run (freeing you up to make more money taking pictures etc.).

The fact is that skill matters when it comes to picture-taking. In one study, 64% of homes in the $400,000 to $500,000 price range with DSLR photos sold within six months, compared to 46% of homes with point-and-shoot photos. Professional photos are also twice as likely as user-generated ones to be shared, meaning the work you do in the field truly matters.

Companies spend millions of dollars on online advertising to help them sell their products (currently a $149 billion industry) and there’s no reason you shouldn’t budget money aside on services that will help you push out more of your products. Whether it’s $5 or $500, the investment you make in professional photo editing company is well worth it and will essentially pay for itself ultimately when you think about what you’ll have time to accomplish with the time saved.

Only you will be able to determine what the exact correct dollar number is to invest, depending on how much business you regularly do and how fast your turnaround is. However, it’s safe to say for most typical small to medium size businesses investing a couple hundred dollars per month will go a long way in improving your services overall.