You guys who post a ton, hep me out with something

[Caesium]

Alright, this is not a dig as I really want your insight into this... It seems that in 90% of threads I read on here, the mentality is that an image needs 6 hours of D&B to be good.

I am a commercial photographer in a mid sized market doing primarily local and regional work with an occasional small national job (nothing cool). I have a couple of retouchers I send work off to when I am unable to do the work in house and when the job can afford it. Their day rates range from around $800 to $1200 and they will usually spend the majority of a day on a single image.

Now then, my shoots average between $2500 and $5000 (excluding talent) for the most part these days, and believe me, clients are asking me to find every possible way to cut out as much cost as possible in this economy. Seeing as I am generally delivering 4 or more images from these type shoots, post processing alone can easily double my invoice if I allow. My questions:

Are you guys who stand behind the "D&B or nothing" view of retouching just so blessed as to have $30,000 budgets for every job that comes your way? Do you have a middle ground (i.e. quick and dirty approach) that you use for the jobs that this level of work is simply not in the budget?

What about editorial? Unless its for Vogue (or another mag on a similar level) there is no way they are dropping this type of cash right now into retouching. I had start out using magazine shoots as a large part of my marketing plan, but the rates have dropped to nothing. Good publications are now down to $1500 or so for a cover and that gets split between hair, makeup, wardrobe, location, props, assistant(s), talent, post, and, as crazy as it sounds, I would kinda like to make enough to eat that day too.

Every day, industry blogs report what a sorry state of affairs commercial work is in right now, how tight the market is and how no one is paying what they used to. Spend 5 minutes on aphotoeditor.com if you have any doubt.

So, what are you guys doing? Is everyone really only doing 6 hours+ per image jobs or is there this huge "middle of the road" portion of your business you don't really want to talk about because it doesn't showcase your talent?

If you are cutting corners, what corners are they usually?

What are you doing for your editorial clients?


I love the look of a 10 hour dodge and burned image as much as the next guy, however, I know if I did it on all my work, I would retouch myself of out work and into a welfare check. I am anxious to hear about your situations.

[Cuervo79]

Normally you do the retouch according to the necessity, D&B works plain and simple, do I use it for everything? Yes but with varying degrees.
I usually do a mix of: using the healing and clone tools to cleanup the skin first, then a bit of general D&B and last a bit of degrunge technique set a different values mostly 3 ( 12, 6, 3 ).
It depends on your necessity and what you can get away with. You can get away with more on a full body photo than on a closeup (at least on my 8mp camera I can).

Most of the time you don't have to do D&B to the pore level, so you just do it on the general one which is quite faster...

[crazyfly1]

Cuervo79, I wonder about this too.
So it sounds as though you use other methods for tiny and small blemishes, pimples and such and then use db to even out large areas of skin tone. Maybe making the cheek on the left closer to the luminosity of the cheek on the right, for example.
Is that close to what you do?

[Kermy]

If you're good you manage the amount of time that you as a client want me to spend per image. My last job I had 35 lifestyle shots to get done and I had a week and a half including the weekend. So I spent about 3-4hrs per image, some quicker than others. The cliend realised that they were not going to get vogue at that rate or price for that matter. For something like this i undertake a pretty detailed healing/cloning then follow up by a d&b but manage my time and not get too picky. You have to manage expections, not everyone wants vogue and not everyone is willing to pay for it. And also if you set the precedent of delivering vogue and charging way below what you actually spent on the job, you are doing a diservice to your client and yourself because you will not be able to consitently deliver on time and on budget...

[Cuervo79]

@Crazyfly1 yes that's pretty much what I do normally, with the addition that I also use the degrunge technique in the mix with everything.
Even when doing "solely" D&B I always do a comprehensive cleaning with the healing and clone tools.

[crazyfly1]

Cool, makes sense. I have tried to use db at a pixel level and fix individual pores and it is not fun and ends up looking worse then when I started when I zoom out.

[Cuervo79]

If this is happening to you you need to review again how you do D&B. Normally when you're doing this at the pore level and then you zoom out, what you see that "looks worse" isn't that you're doing it wrong, but that you're uncovering "micro shadow patches" that where camouflaged because of the pore problems. These you then adjust with a more general scale D&B. So you not only work at pore level but zoom out to 50 and 25 percent. As I said D&B works.

[longside1]

Apologies in advance for hijacking this thread, but could someone please point me in the direction of the 'de-grunge' technique?

Many thanks,

[amica999]

Originally Posted by longside1

Apologies in advance for hijacking this thread, but could someone please point me in the direction of the 'de-grunge' technique?

Many thanks,

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=213

[longside1]

aha! Thanks for the link :-)

[Caesium]

Originally Posted by Kermy

My last job I had 35 lifestyle shots to get done and I had a week and a half including the weekend. So I spent about 3-4hrs per image, some quicker than others.

I can very easily manage the time per image.

I would be curious to know if this was regional or national use. What I see is 35 images at a (low side) average of 3 hours per. Let's say you billed at $50 per hour, that would be:

3 X $50 = $150

$150 X 35 = $5250

If post came in at that rate, we are back in a $30,000 shoot again by the time we get creative fees, usage, talent, and all the accessories in the final invoice. Was this a $30,000 shoot?

If not, we are back to my original question: How in the heck are you guys making sense of the market, your time, and what you charge??? If you cut the above guess of $50 in half to $25, I cannot see how you are not paying to work after you figure in your costs of doing business and taxes. Even then, the new rate of $2610 is no small line item in a local or regional shoot.

So what is it then? Are my guesstimates for rates that far off? Have I been overpaying like a mother at the average of about $75 per hour for my retouching? Are we fudging on time and not reeeeaaaaaly putting in those 6 to 10 hours per image that we say we are?

It's simple math.... Hourly Rate X Time = Final Cost. No one I can find wants to pay the final cost I have been coming up with on 4 hour retouches, nevermind the 6 to 10 hour jobs. So, as I see it, either the Hourly Rate or the Time has to give. Which is it and how are you doing it?

Please, feel free to cite with examples from recent work.



PS: A few of the people I really wanted to see post here haven't. Kinda reaffirms my suspicions that many of those who say to do 6 hours of D&B per image are either not doing this for money or not doing what they preach. (Natala, I am NOT talking about you )

[Cuervo79]

You also have to consider that not everyone is hiring in the united states. For example Natalia's in Argentina. I was reading something similar on MM and some people employ people in India to keep costs down.

[eraanexact]

6 hours for dodge and burn on anything but maybe a very complex composite is way too excessive. Also "pore level" is stupid. I rarely d&b at anything greater than 100%, and I do a fairly large amount at 16 and 25%.
Zoom out and take care of the big areas, and magically the zoomed in smaller areas don't stand out as much.

I'm saying this as a professional with close to 10 years under my belt, just in case you were wondering.

[Cuervo79]

It would be interesting to know what is your definition of pore level.... For me if you're D&B pores or wrinkles that would be pore level regardless of the zoom %. I do agree though that you don't have to go past certain zoom number because you're doing overkill and it won't really matter in the end product.
I also found out that the zoom number is a bit subjective depending on the size of the photo, I normally work with my 8mp photos and 100 50 and 25 % zoom numbers worked, then I started retouching a photo from a 12MP camera and it turned out I had to go the extra number 12 or 16 % to get the same view...

[nycretoucher]

I am in charge of a studio just outside of NYC, it's a division of a printing empire, but in my recent experience I would have to say that it seems people aren't spending the money on the make-up, location, talent, etc. But they seem to be spending it on the retouching instead. I just retouched one image that billed 10 hours, at $125 and hour, and it was a picture from a wedding that someone took in poor lighting with their consumer point and shoot digital camera. We had to remove two people, retouch them fixing the lighting etc, then place them standing next to each other into supplied background photos taken the same way.

I am now 15 hours into a product image with no healing or D&B, just tons of masking for swatch matching purposes, even though this was professionally photographed image.

So the retouching work is there, it just seems people are cutting corners, big time, in other aspects of their projects. Sometimes it makes me wonder, why someone would spend all this money on something that could be fixed with quality photography, or a little foresight. For instance, I recently had to spend hours removing stray body hair off a model that could have been solved with the purchase of a 50 cent bic disposable razor and some shaving cream before taking the photograph. But it keeps me busy so I bite my tongue and keep the pen moving.

[eraanexact]

By "pore level", I mean that if you were working on a section of skin, and all that was visible on your desktop was skin and pores, and it's not a close up macro shot, then that's pushing it.
Saying it's stupid was probably poor word choice on my part actually.

[crazyfly1]

Eraanexact, Thank you for your comment, so it sounds as though you are confirming what Cuervo79 said; that as a professional you use db basically to fix shading and not to fix blemishes. Am I understanding correctly?

[Kermy]

The rate per image is detirmined what time is a realistic average that industry is willing to pay for. say for an advertising agency in london, they charge retouching to the client at say £150-£200 per hour. but as the actual retoucher that an ad agency hires as a freelancer, they'll pay you between £25-£36 per hour. the range is detirmined by the level of quality and proven track record you develop over time. charging anything lower really puts you out of the professional catagory and automatically prices you out of even being considered. and if you do any creative retouching, ie comping of several photos to make one final image you can charge more and you could spend days or weeks on a certain image. I've just finished a campaign where i've spent well over 30hrs over an image...

[marthav]

what is D&b?

[Caesium]

Thanks NYC, good info. Just curious, are you retouching for the printer or for a commercial studio? The example you gave of the wedding photo, I can see. There are a lot of really dumb wedding photographers pretending to make a living and I can totally see one of them doing something like that.

Unless your are shooting for Al's Tavern, however, I would think the quality of photography would be much better on the average.

You are correct about the other areas being cut as well, but it has been my experience that retouching is high on the list of expendables as any other normal line item, if not higher.

[eraanexact]

Crazyfly, no, I use d&b to fix blemishes too. Just not zoomed in at 150%, and not for six hours.
I use a combination of cloning/history brush and d&b to fix just about every skin issue.

[crazyfly1]

marthav, Dodge and Burn.

eraabexact, thank you. i would be interested to see a copy of the db layers from one of your images.

[marthav]

thank you!