MicrostockGroup

Man, you guys are hiring out everything...hiring to write blog and edit your image.  Sounds like you don't want to do any of the fun stuff...hahahaha

Hi Stockforfood,

 I use retouchers who keyword and upload and track my sales at www.lookstat.com they are here in Seattle, Wa. There is also Janco Tech out of India that does similar work as well. These are the two best that I know of. I hope this helps.

Best,
Jonathan

For many years I made good money supplying product photography to Dr Martens shoes, here in the UK. Products were shot,retouched, cut-out inc clipping path, colour corrected and CMYK proofed.
These days all the cut-outs are sourced in India. I dont know specifics but the cost is mere pence per image on batches of approx 500 products a time.

Suljo.... someone could maybe ask you the same, you know?
If people have no time to edit images, that maybe means they have thousands of unedited images, and they make new shots everyday, so they maybe have less and less time to do it. They want to hire someone to edit their images, and there is nothing bad in that. They obviously want to pay that person, so it may be good opportunity for people who want additional earnings. I lost my job and I would do it, but my upload speed is only 192Kbps...so I could never upload PSD files fas enough.

It does seem a bit weird.  They have a blog, but don't want to write for it.  They want to do micro, but they don't want to do the work.  I don't know.  I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to shop everything out.

Hey guys,

It's nice that this subject has raised so much discussion

In fact, please get us right - it is not that we don't want to do anything about our site or our images - yes, we are very passionate about doing the both things. And we do work by ourselves on the both.

However, so far it is not what we make our living with and I don't think it will be in near future. We have our other commitments, full-time office job being one and the main of them, which limits the time we can spend on our hobbies dramatically. We have only a few hours a week left 'for ourselves'.  So outsourcing some stuff seems the only alternative to us to keep our 'hobby business' running at a pace a bit faster than 1 article  + 10 images a week. What is bad in giving part of a job to a third-party? We are all in Micrstocks forum after all, which means, at least to some extent, we are all thinking of photography not only as pure arts, but as business as well...

Well, finally, we've written up our offer on image preparation, you may check it on our site: http://www.stockforfood.com/we-need-help/

P.S. And please be sure that we do invest our mind and soul into these things. Everything what has been created so far is made 100% by ourselves, without hiring anyone to help us. But now we feel like the only way for us to grow (we are not ready to give up our jobs!) is to outsource some stuff. And we hope many people will find it usefull after all: both our offers, our site and our photography...


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Best Regards,
Vitaly and Maria
www.stockforfood.com

I started using retouching company from India since couple of weeks and so far I am happy with the result. That releases a lot of my time and is allowing me to produce more photos per month.

I still need to see how will it work on a longer term, but I look at it positively.

So far my production was less than 100 photos per month, so my short-term target is to get it to 100-150 photos per month.

Hi All,

Thought I would dive in here. We've been handling keywording, retouching and submission for stock photographers for some time now and have been working with great customers like Jonathan (thanks for the mention sir!), Tom Grill and others.

Our goal with our Back Office services is to allow photographers to spend more time creating images. If you're interested, please drop me a line/pm me and we can chat about requirements and specifics.

Cheers,

Rahul
[email protected]

From their website:
Prices for Keywording Services:

Standard Base          25 words             $0.88

In the same time, DT charges $0.40.

$2 per photo I don't know how many takers you'll get.

Seems like a pretty low hourly rate to me with no recurring income.

I'm not the fastest photoshopper in the world, maybe for some guru would think otherwise.

 

Thanks - yup I looked at their site, the pricing seems reasonable... 200-400 a month I produce myself, doing all the processing and stuff, so I don't consider it especially large volume... If I am free to just shoot, I'd think it would be more than 400 a month for sure... The only problem I am struggling with - I am a perfectionist, and if I find that after paying 5 bucks per image I end up doing more work on the image or completely redoing it (it happened with the first person I tried to hire), then it would be a complete waste of money, wouldn't it?.. sigh... I guess the only way to find out is to try some small batches with different companies and see whom I am happy with...

At the moment I only use retouching service, not a complete processing, and I am satisfied with the quality.