Photo retouching services for new clients

As a photo editor with an online presence. I often receive enquiries from large corporations. looking for photo retouching services that can manage bulk photo editing orders. I enjoy fixing all the photos that get sent to me myself. But with bulk orders I have had to assemble a team that are always available for me. To outsource my photo editing orders.

I have a team of photo editors based in Bangladesh. they specialise in product photography, cutting out and replacing backgrounds. I also employ professional photo editors and photo restoration specialists.

I got a bulk photo editing enquiry from Halo Media Works. They described themselves as a company based in Cleveland in the USA. Here is their email:

Hi Team,

Hope all’s well with you. We’re headquartered in the US. We were reviewing your website and the services that you offer are of interest to us.

We are looking for vendors who we could partner with for Retouching services. Could you please share your portfolio of what all services do you offer & their pricing.

We would also like to understand the strength of your organisation as we plan to offer bulk orders. It would be great if you could share the information with us.

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Regards,

HALO MEDIA WORKS

After checking them out online. I replied with my standard outline of my photo editing services that I offer. I mentioned the fact that I often work with large companies and manage bulk orders.

With large orders I have a team of photo editors on standby to process them in a short turnaround. I was a bit surprised that they had asked for my portfolio as I have my portfolio linked on my website.

Thanks for writing back.

We’ve checked the ‘Example Work’ tab and the images placed there are greatly edited so well done.

It’s good to see that you’ve served some large corporations and it makes us more confident to collaborate with you. So thanks for sharing this info.

Does your company allow a round of FREE TRIAL image editing? For us to gauge your photo retouching services quality. Also for you to understand the type of work you will be receiving from us.

Post the FREE TRIAL you can then quote us your best price based on the sample images edited by your company. We can then take it from there.

Photo retouching services

Since this was going to be bulk photo editing orders. I contacted my various retouching partners and asked them if they were happy to do the test images. Of course for them, editing a few sample photos for the sake of a new client was not a problem.

Hi Team,

The instructions to edit these are within the same folder.

Categories – Baby retouching, Beauty photo editing, Food retouches, Jewellery edits, Product enhancement & Photo restoration.

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

This is when I got a little suspicious as they had sent 12 photos that needed enhancement. Once again I contacted my photo editors and they were happy to go ahead with the test images. When I outsource my editing photos, I always discuss fees with my editors. That way I know how much to quote. The retouched photo edits were then sent to me and I forwarded these to the client.

I also mentioned’ with all my clients the first job is to get a feel for exactly what they need. Normally I might need to get some amends done. Once I know exactly what my clients want from my photo retouching services. These amends are no longer needed.

I always do a quality check before sending photo edits and I was really pleased with the final photos.

The feedback was quite ludicrous:

Hi Chris, here is our observations for the images edited. Baby, Beauty and Restoration – Your team was able to meet 40% as per our quality expectations. Please share your price for these images and how many such images can you edit per day ?

Jewellery and Food – Edit wasn’t satisfactory and did not meet our requirements.

Let us know.

It was at this point that I realised they were time wasters. My team and I had done a great set of retouched and restored photo edits. All the photo edits that for the jewellery retouch were completed. Gold enhancement, the blemishes removed and the stone was also edited to bring out the colour.

Like with all my clients. Expectations of how a final edited photo should look, like differ from person to person.

I always say that I am happy to make changes until the photo retouch is exactly what they wanted. They were obviously fishing to see the quality of my work (their competition). Also if they wanted to use my photo retouching and restoration services. They were trying to drive down my prices.

This was confirmed when they sent me a breakdown of what they pay:

Below mentioned is our budget.

Baby – $0.75

Beauty – $1.00

Restoration – $2.00

Those prices are laughable. I use specialist retouchers and when I mentioned these, they had a good laugh. One of the downsides of working online is you will always encounter time wasters. That is by far outweighed by the many great photo retouching and photo restoration projects I get to work on.

I have built a great customer base and they have rewarded me with some 5 star google reviews.