If you are reading this, then in most likelihood, you are looking to find out how professional photo editing services charge their clients. Chances are, you are already working with a service provider and are curious as to how outsource service providers price their services. So let’s just get an idea of how image editing firms set their prices.
The best photo retouching services prices will vary depending on which company you go to and where that company is located but overall, it really comes down to a handful of key factors –
Let’s get into details of these factors and give you an idea about our professional photo editing service factor –
How Outsource Service Providers Price Their Services
The complexity of the image.
Logically speaking, the more complex an image is, the more it’s going to cost to have it edited. But here we are talking about what makes an image complex.
Starting off, we categorize complexity with how many techniques and procedures it takes to edit an image. A client could tell us to cut out the background from an image and depending on the photo editing service we can offer a range of prices. If it’s a simple image, for example, an image of a box, we can background removal easily using only clipping paths. But let’s say that box has a dog sitting on it, we would have to use the clipping path technique and for the dog’s fur, which clipping paths cannot fully capture the details of, we would have to use the masking technique and the price would go up as an extra technique had to be used.
If we have to remove the background from images, including netting elements such as mesh fencing, the photo restoration service cost would depend on two things. If the color of the mesh and the color of the background are vastly different, we can easily use the masking technique to separate the two and we would charge less for it but if the net and the background have overlapping common colors, then we would have to clip out each one of the holes in the net and that would drive up the cost.
It’s important for clients to understand how they can photograph their items so that it’s cheaper for them to get an edit. But it’s not always possible to capture perfect images 100% of the time and we try to keep our prices as reasonable as possible.
On the other hand, images that require retouching can vary a lot in professional photo editing services price. As most of the work we receive for product retouching requires us to remove dust, scratches, blemishes, and wrinkles, pricing depends on the number of things to be removed. If the model or item has a lot of wrinkles or dust that need to be removed the cost to edit these will surely come up.
Images requiring color correction or color variants can also vary in price, not because of the color correction itself but also because of the shape and complexity of the area that requires the color correction service.
Let’s say you want an entire image to be tinted in a single color, we can just select the border and change the colors and we will charge you very low for it but if you require us to change the color of a model clothing and such, we would have to clip out the article of clothing first using either clipping paths or masking and on top of that we would have to apply color correction and so the price would go up.
Image complexity also depends on how many items in a single image have to be edited. If there is more than one separate item in an image, we’ll charge more than if it were a single item but if the items overlap, there would be less to edit out, and the price quote would go drop.
The time required to complete editing the image
This ties in with the complexity of the image. The longer an image takes to be edited, the more it’s going to drive up the prices while taking into account, the more complex an image is, the longer it will take to edit. A lot of the time images that require retouching are more expensive to edit not because the job is difficult to do but because it takes a lot of time to remove dust and blemishes, especially if the object is covered in dust and scratches. The same case applies to clipping. The more parts there are to clip out, the more time it will take.
Lucky for us, our designers are all professionally trained and can get through most types of image editing fairly quickly and that makes a big impact on the prices we offer.
Rush Charges
For our product photo editing service or any company similar to ours, normal rates apply for images we need to deliver within 24 hours or more. But we do charge extra for delivery deadlines which are shorter than 24 hours as shown in the table below.
| Delivery time | Price factor |
| 1H | 200% |
| 3H | 175% |
| 6H | 150% |
| 10H | 125% |
| 12H | 125% |
| 24H | 100% |
We do deliver the jobs as soon as we finish them. You could request a job to be delivered in 24 hours but we will almost always deliver it as soon as we finish and no rush charges would apply.
Number of images
As with any business, the higher the amount of work to be done, the less you are going to be charged per unit and more likely a discount is going to be offered. We normally offer discounts of 10% if the cost of your job exceeds $250 or if you are doing a project and are unsure of how large the sum of images is going to be.
There are quite a few factors that can make you eligible for a discount, so always feel free to ask.
There are definitely more factors that go into how a company sets a price for its services but these are the major ones. Our prices start at a very low amount of US$0.3 and with increasing complexity, it can go up to $10 or even more but we try to be as reasonable as possible and offer an appropriate quote. Most firms provide a price breakdown when they offer you a quote but if you are not sure why you are being charged a specific amount then always feel free to ask. The customer always has the right to know!!
