large quantity of retouching pricing and timescale

[Anthirium]

I have worked as a graphic designer for quite a few years, and have recently started to do some freelance retouching/product photography jobs.

I have just landed a large project of around 1000 products to photograph and edit for a website, and I am very new to the pricing side of things so was hoping for some advice. The images need to look great, so there will be a fair amount of retouching required, but obviously as they are going to be smallish for the web, they don’t need to be worked on to a huge resolution.

My two main issues are how to price things and how long is a reasonable time for it to take? I know this is a difficult question as it depends how much work is to go into each image, but having no experience in a job of this scale, I don’t want to say it will take x amount of time, only for them to look elsewhere and find that other people are charging more/ quoting half the time and contracting out to speed things up.

Thanks for your help!

Brian

[twopoint0]

No matter how you look at it, it comes down to what you need to charge per hour of your time, and how many products you can shoot, retouch, color correct, file manage/upload/archive per hour.
I'd suggest doing a test. It will give you an idea of the time involved and it will hopefully lock your customer into choosing you based on the fabulous quality you'll be showing him. Keep in mind that you'll gain speed as you go by finding shortcuts, writing actions, etc.
Try to shoot as cleanly as possible to reduce your post production time.
When you negotiate, get more time in exchange for any discount given.
Don't work for free.