Pros & Cons of Hiring an Editor – 3 Tips to Outsource Your Photo Editing

Should you Outsource your Photo editing? Read these helpful tips!

If you’re running a photography business and find yourself feeling too busy to edit your photos, you might want to consider outsourcing! These tips will help you decide if you should be hiring an editor to outsource your photo editing.

In this tutorial you get the thoughts from a real estate photographer, Mike Burke on outsourcing photo editing. He discusses outsourcing being a great way to save time and lessen your workload while delivering to clients quickly.

On the other hand, you might not get the quality you want from outsourcing. You might also lose your own editing skills and pay more money for outsourcing.

Outsourcing Your Editing – the positives and negatives

To be a successful photographer, you are going to want to book a lot of photoshoots so you can make a decent living. But you might find yourself overloaded with the amount of work required. So, could you hire an editor to outsource your photo editing?

Outsourcing is hiring other people or using software to do tasks so you don’t have to. 

Hiring other people can be a good way to hand off tasks that you don’t like to do or want to spend your time on.

Pros of Outsourcing your editing

Photo by Nghia Le on Unsplash

Pro 1: Contracting out your Editing saves you time and gives you time for other things

The biggest advantage to outsourcing the editing of your photos is that it will save you a lot of time. Because you aren’t taking the time to edit, you can focus on taking the photos and booking the clients and let your editor do the editing step. 

If you don’t have to spend time editing, you have more time for other photoshoots or freetime. Having someone else editing the photos you spent all day taking will allow you to have more work-life balance.

Pro 2: Outsourcing could decrease your workload

Editing well is a time consuming process that takes a lot of mental energy. You already have a big workload if you are running your own business and managing the bookkeeping, admin, and marketing as well as photography.

By hiring an editor to do the work for you, you won’t need to add that to your workload.

Hiring an editor to take that step off your plate will help you to manage your overall workload better and not feel so busy.

Pro 3: Hiring an Editor to outsource your photo editing means you get Quicker delivery of photos to clients

You are probably so busy taking care of all the photoshoots and business tasks. When will you have the time to edit and get the images to the client when they want them?

Using a hired editor, you can be working on other things while the images are edited and get them back to the client much faster than if you were scheduling the time to do them yourself. 

This will ensure you can deliver the images on schedule and have happier clients. 

Clients can have high expectations for the time between taking the photos and getting the edited images from you. Outsourcing could be the answer!

Cons to Outsourcing your Editing

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Con 1: Issues with the photo editing quality not being consistent

It is important for your brand to be successful that the quality you deliver is the same high quality every time. If not, your clients won’t know what to expect from you and this can be an issue.

Sometimes with hiring editors they may be online or overseas and you don’t really know who is editing your photos. And they may be a different person and deliver different qualities every time.

Con 2: You can lose your own editing skills if you aren’t using them!

If you don’t edit your photos because you’ve outsourced that task, you can lose the editing skills you had. Editing is an art that needs to be practiced often to stay sharp. You might also fall behind on the best tools and technical knowledge for editing if you aren’t keeping up regularly.

Con 3: Paying someone else to do your work

It might feel strange to hire others to do your work, and your finances might feel it too. Paying other people to do something you know how to do might seem backwards. 

Spending money on editors affects your budget negatively in comparison to editing them yourself.

Tips for Hiring an Editor to Outsource Your Photo Editing

Editor Outsourcing Tip 1: Know how to edit your photos to the quality that you want

It’s important to know the craft before you outsource. Why? You could have a situation where your editors are unavailable, or you need something done fast and no one else can do it. If you know how to edit photos well, you will be able to still deliver to clients in this situation.

It’s also good to know the whole process for your photos so you are able to train up new editors in exactly how you want your photos edited. 

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Outsource your photo editing Tip 2: The best thing to counteract inconsistency is to hire only one editor or company 

It will help you if you can outsource your editing to one person or a group who delivers great edited photos for you all the time. That way, you won’t have to deal with different quality of photos and you know what to expect with this editor.

Photo by Charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Hiring an editor Tip 3: Raise your prices to help cover the cost of outsourcing

If contracting out your editing feels like it’s stretching your budget, you can consider raising your prices a bit to adjust. Especially if you are booking so many clients that you are finding you need to outsource other tasks or hire more photographers. 

It is worth looking at the prices you charge to cover some of your outsourcing.

Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash

Outsourcing your photos has positives and negatives, and at the end of the day it’s about balancing workload and finance.

Which tip will you use to outsource your photo editing?

Let us know in the comments!