It’s not a secret that retouching photos is rather time-consuming. That is why a lot of individuals and companies prefer to hire professional retouchers to do this job. Even photographers often prefer to delegate retouching services to outsource experts rather than do everything by themselves.
Providing such services, however, can be suitable for those who work from home. It is a quite attractive and profitable job for individuals who have a good eye for images.
You do not need to be a professional photographer or artist. Just invest some money in training, acquiring editing software (Adobe Photoshop can be a good option), and advertising your services. If you have enough time and desire to develop your skills and make money with them, this job is right for you.
Here, we provide a short guide on how to make money at home photo retouching. We hope some tips will help you to start a new career.
Where to Start
You may think that you are not an artist at all. You do not need to be one to take up a photo retouching job. However, if you like perfection in images and can see what to do to make colours more vibrant, you can easily learn how to become a photo retoucher.
Learning is the most essential task for you to start with. Retouching is both an art and field of study in itself so you need to learn some basics of it first.
Photo retouching requires some specific skills you need to acquire. They are:
- Adjusting colours and hues;
- Correcting blemishes;
- Using Adobe Photoshop software;
- Reshaping lighting effects;
- Removing objects in the photos, and others.
Taking an offline course is one of the training options. You can also find a good tutorial on YouTube or read step-by-step articles on the Net.
You also need a state-of-the-art, high-resolution monitor at your home office. Learning how to colour-calibrate it is essential as well.
How to Set Up Home Photo Retouching as a Business
If you have decided to make home photo retouching your business, here are some main steps to follow to set it up.
Step 1. Arrange the convenient workplace at home. You have to prepare it in the same way you would like to do in your office.
Step 2. Open an account for getting payments. Your clients should be able to pay with their banking cards. PayPal is one of the best options because it is a very secure payment system and many people are already using it. Or you may opt for some other variants which are suitable for you.
Step 3. Consult about taxes. Having an independent consultant is a good idea. You need to know what to do with various tax forms. Speaking to a tax expert will help you to arrange your finances properly.
Step 4. Start your outreach. Before offering your services to potential clients, decide how much time you will need for turning photos around and what your rates will be. As a tip, consider that your rates should be based on the time you spend on work completion. Your price brackets can also involve the size and complexity of a specific photo.
Now, you can start offering your services to potential clients.
Advertising Is Important
You need to be very good at socialising and networking to inform everybody about your services via word of mouth. Unfortunately, not so many people have these soft skills so they mostly rely on advertising.
The most positive characteristic of modern advertising procedures is that you do not have to pay your fortune for them. You can develop a marketing strategy of your own to promote your home retouching services.
The first thing you will also need is a portfolio. Think about the best images you have managed to complete while training. Or there can be a set of images which, in your opinion, represents your skills at the fullest. You can include the images ‘before-after’ so that your prospective customers could see what to expect from your expertise.
Apart from your portfolio online, you may also compile it physically and keep it at hand in case some acquaintances of yours visit you and want to see what you are doing. They can be very useful in promoting your services by word of mouth.
You can also extend your advertising campaign by creating an account on a reputable photography website. Picasa, Flickr, or Jux are quite suitable for that. There, you will showcase everything you have accomplished and achieved. You may probably need permission from the site’s owner to publish your work there.
Using Social Media as a Marketing Strategy
You may already have your personal profile somewhere on Facebook or Instagram. Now, you need a business page to reach followers and receive conversions.
You can use Twitter for this purpose too. It works perfectly for networking. You can make quick offers and exchange ideas with people from all over the world.
If you think about having your personal website, starting with social media is a good idea. A website needs continuous maintenance. A Facebook account is not so demanding. Probably, in the future, when you make some money at photo retouching, you will be able to hire a good programme developer and / or a web designer and start a website which will represent your skills and techniques to a wider target audience.
Making Improvements Is a Good Idea for Your Business Development
You can start with one model of the home business. Though it does not mean that you will need to stick to it for life. As you continue to work, you will see more clearly all preferences and requirements of clients, your ways of working and being efficient as well as who your followers on social media are and how you can make use of them. Incorporate all this information into your photo retouching processes and you will see that your business structure starts to improve.
You may even notice some considerable changes in time and effort you spend on retouching one photo. It happens that the quality of your work depends a lot on it. You might have spent about two hours on one photo at the start but over time you will feel that you need about five hours to make it perfect. All this means that you can make some adjustments in pricing. Any service of the highest quality should be paid properly. If you don’t take this concept into account, your business will not make sense.
Finally, constant learning and evolving is a must for every photo retoucher. Don’t stop finding out something new and that will be your straightforward path to success and recognition.
Final Thoughts
Here you are with our complete guide on making money at home photo retouching and developing your business. You can look through these tips again to decide whether this kind of job will suit you well.
There may be some other options on how to develop and improve your home photo retouching business. Though these tips and recommendations are essential ones.
We believe that this short guide will be useful for you and you will become a great retoucher soon.