Outsourcing is quickly becoming a standard practice. More and more photographers are using outsourcing services full time, while others are using them during the busy part of their season. While outsourcing has become more common in the industry, there are still some questions as to it’s worth. Photographers not familiar with the service see ups and downs to incorporating this type of service, and sometimes it can be hard to see which side wins. After my last article reviewing ProImageEditors, people wanted to know if it was worth it.
In order to help make the decision easier for everyone, I thought it would be a good idea to build a good old fashioned pros and cons list. While not every pro and con is applicable to every person, I’ll try and pick items that are more or less relatable to most shooters.
Cons
Cost - There are many different ways to outsource your editing. You can hire a full-time or part-time assistant to do your editing in house or you can even hire a virtual assistant to edit virtually. There are also a host of other companies that specialize in editing and perform this service for many other photographers. These various options vary widely in price and offerings, but no matter what option you go with, it is going to cost you some money. The upside to this though is that some options are way more affordable than others. For example, hiring a full time employee to edit could be a pretty large expense, while sending your images to a place like ProImageEditors is quite affordable.
Loss of control - This one is a little harder to put a finger on, but I hear it all the time and have even said it myself. I just can't give up the control. What exactly does this mean? I think it mostly has to do with letting something go that you are used to being responsible for. Change can be hard. A lot of people also feel that their editing has a lot to do with their style and identity. They feel that what they are doing is unique and not possible to reproduce. The thing here is that this may be true for some specific edits, but definitely not the case for the majority of images that you deliver. You also still maintain full control because you will always be the last person that checks the images before delivery.
Learning from mistakes - One of the biggest benefits to editing your own work is seeing all the mistakes you made. The more you find yourself straightening images, correcting white balance, or cropping distractions, the more you will learn what you need to do to be a better shooter.
Hidden gems - This one doesn't always show up for me during the editing process, but sometimes when playing with an image, I stumble upon an interesting edit by just playing around with sliders. These types of edits tend to be happy accidents while trying to make some arbitrary adjustment to a normal image and then being drawn to something interesting that catches my eye. If you are not doing these arbitrary adjustments, then you probably won’t see these interesting characteristics that catch your eye.
Pros
Business time - This one is maybe the biggest advantage and I think single handedly outweighs all of the cons. The time you would normally spend editing can now be spent on other tasks. Although sending your images out for outsourcing will cost you money, you need to consider how much your time is worth. You need to take into consideration how many hours it takes you to edit and compare that to how much it would cost you to outsource. If it takes you 10 hours to edit a set of images that would cost you $50 to outsource, that comes to $5 an hour. As a working professional, your time is worth way more than $5 an hour.
Turn around - The more you shoot the more you have to edit. So the busier you get, the longer it takes you to get images back to clients. If you have a wedding every Saturday of the month along with engagement sessions and the various other types of shoots you offer, then your backlog of editing can quickly grow out of hand. But if you outsource the editing, no longer is a wedding being edited in one hour sprints between emails, shoots, marketing tasks, and the latest episode of House of Cards. The faster your client gets their images, the happier they will be and the more likely they will be to purchase items from you and refer you to friends and family. This leads to more clients, more shooting, and more money in your pocket.
Editing Time - Even if you are not super busy with shoots and need to outsource to keep up, you can still take full advantage of the saved time. Instead of spending all your time editing images to a deliverable standard, now you can use the outsourcing to get the images to this level. From here, you can spend more time on these images to make them even better. So in this scenario you may be spending around the same amount of time editing, but your final delivered product is a much better quality. This again leads to more sales and more referrals.
Conclusion
While I currently have more cons listed than pros, I think it’s pretty clear who the winner is. Outsourcing may cost you some money, but the time it saves you to work on more important things can easily justify that expense. My experience with ProImageEditors has also proven to me that my editing style can be taught and reproduced. This makes the ability to delegate my editing something I'm more comfortable to do. That desire to maintain control has vanished and instead I find it freeing that I no longer have such a large and time consuming task to worry about. I also have more time to dedicate to building up my client experience and work on activities that bring in more clients and more sales.
What are some pros and cons you see with outsourcing? Do you outsource your editing? What have you done with your extra time? If you want to give Outsourcing a try, ProImageEditors offers a trial where they will edit 500 images for you for free!
Simple.
Outsourcing your work can save you time.
But you also are no longer able to call it 100% yours. Editing is 50% of the product.
if you are giving instructions to an editor for exactly what they should do and you have the final say on what gets released with the ability to make any desired changes, then I feel you can still call it 100% yours.
I can't build a house. But I can have a vision for how the house should be built. If someone else does it exactly how I tell them, I cannot then take credit for building the home.
I understand what you're saying. And since I shoot a lot outsourcing would be a life saver. But IMO it becomes someone else work. I just can't do it. I outsource my taxes lol
- Pro: can save you time, and decrease turn around time.
- Con: Potential Lack of consistency. If it's a company and you are getting a random editor each time, you potentially won't have the consistency which can impact your brand.
totally agree. that's why is important to pic a company that can give you a dedicated editor or at least a small team that manages a set of accounts.
Does the need to out source editing come from the practice of overshooting ? For those photographers who have never shot film never think about the cost of overshooting. With film comes the cost of the film and processing, with digital the cost is time in post processing. Think before you press the button and your photography is 100% yours.
i was thinking the exact same thing.
I've often wondered if this was cost effective. I've seen some shops that are pretty good. I'm still a novice when it comes to editing and honestly I don't like it nearly as much as shooting. Maybe once I'm better at it, I'd be able to get it done more efficiently.
Outsourcing can be good if you shoot lots of stuff. Last wedding took me 4 hours to cull and edit. That's super fast for me. For me to organize, upload, outsource, receive, review, cleanup, possibly resubmit, I think would save me an hour or two at most. I learn a lot about weddings and my second shooter from edits.
When I first heard from Proimageeditors and read a review from a well known photographer I was excited about their offer. We were looking to outsource our editing and we have done it in the past successfully with a company which sadly closed shop.
With proimageeditors it however never worked out. After we gave feedback they never really seem to be able to edit the photos how we wanted them to look like. Sometimes it seems like they applied exactly the same settings to 20-30 images; editing them not individually but as a batch. Maybe it also was just miscommunication. We would have loved it if it would have worked out.
If you want to know about Outsourcing Photo Editing & Retouching Services then read this article https://emendstudios.com/blog/all-you-need-to-know-about-outsourcing-pho...
Awesome article, I think some about the organization giving photograph altering administration at a less expensive cost than having an own group of photograph altering.
https://pictionstar.com/photo-editing-retouching/