If you are trying your hands on the photo editing sector then you should understand how much to charge for editing photos. First off, never work for free even if you are trying to gain experience of editing. This is because your time is worth something! Usually, photo editing is charged from a variety of rates depending on the type of editing that was done. It can be anything starting from $1 and can extend up to $50.
When it comes to photo editing, it usually depends on the type of photos that you are editing to decide the charging rate. Different types of photos have different charges. This is because each type of photo has its own beneficial feature that another type of photo may not have.
A photo can be edited in a lot of ways. For example, it can be retouched with lighting, sharpening, contrasting, detailing or color fixing. But this depends on the type of photo that is being edited. Not all the photos need all the types of editing.
This is because different types of photos specialize in different areas. For example, portrait photography specializes in social media content whereas, landscape photography specializes in ecommerce website content.
Types of Photo Editing
Whatever the type of photo that is being edited, we can break it down into three types of editing. They are Basic-level editing, Mid-level editing and Advanced-level editing.
Basic Level Editing.
This type of editing doesn’t include so much work and effort. The tasks are very simple. They could be image cropping, resizing, color correction and simple brush-ups which can be done by almost anyone.
They are charged the lowest among all the categories as the name of this editing suggests by itself. Usually, the rates are around $0.50-$1 depending on the amount of photos that are given to the editor. If the amounts are large then the charges may fall and vice versa.
Mid level editing.
These types of editing usually take more than 10 minutes to get done. Editors usually work with color grading, image sharpness, working with white balance and level curves.
They are charged a bit higher than the basic level which is around $3-$5 per image. Again, this also depends on the amount of photos that are to be edited.
High level editing.
This is the hardest type of editing which requires an editor to spend 20-30 minutes removing the background of the image, working with image masking and layer adjustments and any task that requires multiple stages of editing.
Editors usually charge $7-$10 per image for this type of editing and are usually professional photo editors.
These were the types of editing and their possible price ranges, but how do you determine what to charge in other possible ways? In order to fix a rate, you can judge based on the editing experience and if you are worthy enough, you can charge $50 per hour or maybe more.
You can decide what to charge depending on the type of project or the type of package that you want to provide your clients with.
After all, whether you are a client or an editor, it is very important for you to know how editing works in order to decide the rates or understand how much to charge for editing photos.
