Within the last few years, it has become an industry standard for professional photographers or photography companies to outsource their editing tasks to professional photo editing companies instead of managing photo editing in-house. By outsourcing the menial task of editing photos, photographers are freed to focus on their craft and grow their business.
If you are a professional photographer or work for a professional photographer, you might be considering doing this but are concerned about the loss of vision or the cost of a professional photo editing companies. Despite being a very common practice in the photography industry, these are common reasons that discourage photographers from using photo editing companies. To help put your mind at ease, we have put together a list of reasons why photographers win when they outsource their editing tasks.
Four Advantages to Outsourcing Your Editing Duties to Photo Editing Companies
- To focus on the art that you love.
If you are a professional photographer, you know the very high burnout rate that is associated with your trade. Most photographers love the art of capturing a beautiful moment with a camera lens, but hate the hours upon hours of photo culling services that are required to complete their art. Often, the tedious task of removing electric lines from a landscape shot, or performing color correction services, and one million other tiny edits to each and every picture that you take is the culprit behind photographers getting burnt out and giving up on the trade altogether.
Instead of draining your creative juices doing something that can easily be outsourced inexpensively, using professional editing companies gives you the freedom to only focus on the art that you love, instead of all the busywork behind it. - To acquire new customers and grow your business.
When you outsource photo editing side of your business, you no longer have to spend hours upon hours editing every project that you work on. This gives you more valuable time to acquire new customers and take on more work, which ultimately gives you the ability to increase your revenue and build a solid client base that gives your company more sustainability and financial stability in the long-run. - To sharply reduce your upfront costs.
If you are just getting started, you know that buying the photo editing software and licenses required to give your photos a professional look costs thousands of dollars. This does not even include the hardware and computer systems that you also have to acquire in order to run that expensive software. By outsourcing your photo editing services, you can avoid all of these upfront costs. Plus, the cost of editing photos only comes when you have a paying client that you are making money on!
Even if you already made the investment on high-end photo editing software, you know how quickly these things go obsolete. Using a photo editing service instead of staying on the “bleeding edge” of photo editing technology yourself is a good way to keep your overhead costs low. - To sharply increase your return on investment.
If you are doing the math, you probably already know where this point is going. By spending less on your photo editing software, and by increasing your revenue through more customer acquisitions, you have a much higher return on investment for every dollar that you put into your business.
Choosing the Right Photo Editing Service
Outsourcing your photo editing responsibilities is a great way to preserve your art, free your time to make more money, reduce your upfront costs, and increase your return on investment. However, as some photographers fear, their ownership of the direction of the photos can be lost with the wrong outsourced service. To ensure this doesn’t happen, we recommend being picky about what photo editing service you use. A good photo editing company will:
- Promise to return your photos to you in a timely fashion, and deliver on that promise.
- Include verbiage in the contract that gives you copyright ownership over your work, even after it has been edited.
- Provide a satisfaction guarantee, to ensure you maintain artistic control over your work.
Have you ever outsourced the photo editing of your work? Do you have any tips for other photographers considering this? Please share in the comment section.