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How Much Does Photo Editing Cost?
As a professional photographer and retoucher, you can never charge less than £5 to retouch a picture unless you are doing a lot of minor retouching. On the simplistic hand, it takes about 3 minutes to retouch most photographs; more advanced methods take longer. The hourly rate ranges from £85 and £120, depending on the studio and whether it is for a commercial venture.
How Photography Will Help Designers
If you work as a web or graphic designer, you might be thinking about how you can develop your skills or benefit from learning more about photography. So, here are some of the most important ways you can help.
1. The Relationship between Photo Composition and Design
The arrangement, or how the image is laid out, is one of the most important aspects of quality photography. Layout and balance are important for graphic designers, especially web designers. Although photography and design are distinct disciplines, they do share certain aesthetic “codes,” and learning more about photographic composition will help you with graphic design.
2. A Place for Creativity
As a web or graphic designer, you currently spend a lot of time at your computer. Photography can be a great artistic medium that helps you get away from your machine (at least until it comes time editing or processing your photos). Even though photography will provide a break from your daily work, it also encourages you to use your imagination to do something productive when you are away from it. If you shoot landscapes, wildlife, or something else outdoors, photography will offer a refreshing change of scenery that you would undoubtedly enjoy.
3. Colour and Colour Theory
The significance and influence of colour is all that photography and architecture have in common. As an artist, you are typically well-versed in colour theory and its use in your design work. This knowledge and expertise can be useful in photography, and you can also learn further and develop your understanding of colour as a result of your photographic experiences.
4. Lessen the Reliance on Stock Photos
Designers often use stock images, especially for web development projects. Your customers may have images to use in their projects from time to time, but the accuracy of such photos may vary greatly. And if your clients have high-quality images, you would almost certainly need to use stock photos at some point during the process.
Get more interested in taking your own images and develop the quality as you practise and gain experience. You can find yourself using your own photos instead of stock in certain cases. Being able to reduce the reliance on clichéd stock images, whether for your own websites and ventures or for customers, will be beneficial.
5. Photography Services are a Great Addition to The Design Services
As I described in the introduction, some designers also provide clients with photography services. If you are just starting in photography, this might not sound like a feasible choice right now, but with some experience, you might be able to extend your service offerings to include photography in the future.
Photography would be a great complement to your design services, and you may also be able to get started by representing any of your current design customers. Since the photography and architecture industries are saturated with freelancers and other service providers, many creatives have found it difficult to earn a full-time living in one of these fields. If this has been the case for you in the design industry, adding some part-time income from photography could help you bridge the gap to earning a full-time income. You can study graphic design online with Blue Sky Graphics.
What to Do First
If you want to get started with photography today, you have a lot of choices. You most likely already own a smartphone with a good camera, and there are plenty of choices for point-and-shoot cameras and DSLRs. Our advice to a designer just starting out with photography is to start small with a low-cost camera and escape the impulse to spend a few thousand pounds on a higher-end option. If you buy a cheap camera and determine after a few months or even a few years that you want to take it forward, you can still update your equipment.
Spending a lot of money on a high-end camera does not ensure that you can take great pictures. In reality, beginning with a simple camera can be beneficial because it allows you to concentrate on fundamentals such as composition and lighting. You will find a camera with all of the required features for a fair price in today’s market. Another advantage of doing so this way is that when the time comes to update, you will have a better sense of what you expect from your camera and will be able to make a more informed purchase choice.
Here are a few items we suggest looking for when purchasing a camera.
1. Manual, Shutter Priority, and Aperture Priority Modes
The most valuable feature is that you can monitor the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. We will go through these elements in more detail later, but for now, know that your camera will encourage you to turn off auto mode and make some of these artistic decisions for yourself.
Manual mode allows you to monitor the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. In shutter priority, you control the shutter speed and, optionally, the ISO, while the sensor selects the aperture automatically. In aperture priority mode, you control the aperture and, optionally, the ISO while the camera selects the shutter speed.
2. Capability to photograph in RAW format
If you are just starting in photography, JPGs are probably the only file format you have ever played with straight from the camera. Cameras do not take images in JPG format; instead, they convert them to JPGs during the export process. Some cameras, such as DSLRs, allow you to export images in RAW format. Each camera would have its RAW format (for example, Canon’s and Nikon’s). One of the reasons JPGs are so common is that they are universal and can be used by any application.
