HALF-DECENT EDITING
If you want to know what professional digital editing and retouching can do for your photos – and how much it will cost – this page is here to help. As in the case of my photography services, it comes down to a few simple questions!
1. What difference can digital editing really make?
Take a look at some examples! Click on any image to enlarge into a lightbox view – then you can browse back and forth, using the arrows.
In the examples shown above, the original “straight-out of camera” images on the left don’t look terrible; but the fully-edited images on the right, I venture to suggest, look half decent. By this I mean, they’re good enough to print, put in a picture frame or hang up on the wall – and they justify the cost of doing so.
The transformation, in each case, is the product of between 30 and 90 minutes careful work in applications like Adobe Photoshop – using a variety of specialised techniques and skills. These include AI-based noise reduction, sharpening and enlargement; precise colour, contrast and lighting adjustments, and high-end portrait retouching – including subtle skin-softening and blemish masking, removal of stray hairs, teeth-whitening, subtle eye adjustments and so on.
In addition to all of the above, digital editing offers an endless variety of creative and artistic special effects – such as fine-art quality, tonally crafted black and white conversion, or cinematic colour grading, giving your photos the striking style and impact of a Hollywood movie poster.
What I don’t currently offer, however, is complex, creative compositing (combining multiple elements into a single image for artistic purposes) or graphic design work (combining text and pictures to create advertising copy, posters or promotional materials. I prefer working primarily on individual photographs and rendering them in creatively appealing ways.
2. Which of my photos should I have retouched?
This can be hard to decide – and it helps to get some independent advice on which of your favourite photos has the most potential. Of course, the higher the image quality you’ve got to start with, the more I have to work with – but this is by no means the deciding factor. What the photos mean to you, their uniqueness or creative flair, and the personal stories they tell, are all far more important, in my opinion! I always ask digital editing clients to send me a selection of photos initially, so we can review them together in an online gallery and pick out the best, to be edited in Photoshop.
3. What factors determine the cost of this service?
Just as I do for photography, I use a half-decent pricing system for digital editing work, based on three simple factors:
My basic, per-image fee for digital editing services
Special discounts, which may reduce this fee…
Prints and other optional extras, which add to it!
The next three questions address each of these considerations, in turn.
4. How many edits do you need?
My current base-rate for digital editing work is £25 per fully edited final image (for a minimum of 5 images).
*These rates are fixed for all bookings up to June 31, 2022. I reserve the right to revise my pricing, beyond this date.
5. Would you like a special discount?
I offer discounts to customers who are willing to do me one or more of the following favors:
Book multiple photo-editing sessions, over a period of time.
Spend £100 or more on prints, photobooks or other products.
Combine a digital editing assignment with another service, such as a photoshoot or private tuition.
Just one of these favors gives you a 10% discount on your basic fee; two gives you 15% and three or more is 20%. Also, if you book multiple shoots, your discount applies to them all!
* I hope to announce details of regular photo-day events shortly, in Half-Decent News. Scroll down to subscribe!
6. Do you want to add prints, photobooks or any other products?
In addition to your digital files, I can have your images printed for you, in several ways:
Single prints – in a range of sizes, which may also be mounted and framed.
Multiprints – several images printed together in a bespoke layout
Photobooks – from 24 pages; with various size, binding and format options.
Printed artefacts – such as custom-printed T-shirts, place-mats, coffee mugs etc.
Pricing for all of these options may be found on my prints page. Please keep in mind, however, that the possibility of creating high quality prints, especially in larger sizes depends on the resolution of your original images – so I’ll advise you on what’s possible, during your initial free consultation. This will allow you work out a prints budget, before I get started on the editing work.
It’s important to stress, however, that I don’t ask or encourage customers to commit to a specific print order, when undertaking digital editing work. I recommend holding fire on this decision, until after you’ve seen and approved the finished, edited, digital images.
HALF-DECENT CUSTOMER SERVICE
My customer-services policies for digital editing are as follows:
FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION. Before I accept a digital editing assignment, I’ll ask you to send me high-resolution copies of all the photos you have in mind. I’ll take a close look, before reviewing them with you in an online gallery, so I can give you my best advice on what is (or maybe isn’t) possible, for each photo. All of this costs you nothing.
MULTIPLE VERSIONS, NO EXTRA COST. For every photo I edit, I’m happy to provide both colour and black and white versions, plus two additional colour graded or special effect versions into the bargain. My additional fee, for these optional extras, is precisely £ZERO. How decent is that?
PAY WHEN YOU’RE HAPPY. I don’t expect you to pay for your edited images until you have seen and approved the final, edited versions in my online gallery. When you make payment, I’ll send you a link to download your digital files.