Rough ranges, so you have a number to start from. Basic colour and exposure work runs $1 to $5 an image. Standard portrait retouching, meaning skin, stray hairs and blemishes, is $15 to $40. High end beauty or commercial retouching is $75 to $250 an image and is a different job entirely. Hourly rates for editing sit between $25 and $75 depending on the work and the market.
The spread is enormous because "editing" describes four unrelated activities. The first thing to fix in your own pricing is which one you are actually selling.
Price per image, not per hour
Clients think in images. They know how many they want, and they can compare two quotes instantly. Per-hour pricing makes them wonder how fast you work and turns your efficiency into their saving, which is exactly backwards: the better you get, the less you earn.
Per-image also protects you from the client who sends 400 frames and asks for a quote. Your answer is arithmetic rather than a guess.
Keep hourly for two situations only. Open-ended restoration or compositing work where you genuinely cannot scope it in advance, and retainer arrangements where a client books a block of your time each month.
If you have never worked out what your hour needs to earn once the unbilled admin is counted, the effective hourly rate calculator gives you the floor. Then set a per-image price that clears it at a realistic pace, rather than picking a number that sounds fair.
Know which of the four jobs you are quoting
The single biggest pricing error is quoting basic rates and delivering retouching. The tiers:
- Culling. Reducing a take to the keepers. $0.20 to $0.50 an image, or commonly folded into an editing package.
- Basic edit. Exposure, white balance, straightening, crop, a preset applied and adjusted. $1 to $5 an image. Fast, batchable, and the bulk of volume work.
- Standard retouch. The above plus skin smoothing, blemish removal, flyaway hair, teeth and eye work. $15 to $40 an image, 10 to 25 minutes each.
- High end retouch. Frequency separation, dodge and burn, liquify, background reconstruction, compositing. $75 to $250 an image, an hour or more each.
Write these as named tiers on your price list with one example image each. Clients cannot judge the difference in words, and a before and after pair sells the higher tier better than any description.
Then add the obvious extras as line items rather than absorbing them: object removal at $10 to $30 depending on complexity, background replacement at $20 to $50, and a rush surcharge of 25 to 50 percent.
Charge more when the files are worse
Your price assumes competent source material. It should not survive contact with a badly exposed, mixed-lighting take shot on a phone.
Two ways to handle it. Quote after seeing a sample, always, which is the professional norm and takes five minutes. Or publish a standard rate with a stated surcharge for files needing significant correction, typically 50 percent.
The specific things that should trigger it: heavy underexposure, mixed colour temperatures in one frame, motion blur the client expects you to fix, and JPEGs rather than raw files. That last one is worth pricing separately because a JPEG has a fraction of the latitude and every correction is harder.
Ask for a representative sample rather than their best three. Clients send their best three.
Volume discounts, structured rather than improvised
Discounting for volume is normal and expected in editing work. Structure it so it rewards commitment rather than promises:
- 1 to 50 images: full rate
- 51 to 200: 10 percent off
- 201 to 500: 20 percent off
- 500 plus: quoted, and probably a retainer conversation
Two rules. The discount applies to the actual delivered count, not the count they mentioned on the phone. And there is a minimum order, usually 10 to 20 images or a flat $50, because a two image job costs almost as much in emails and file handling as a twenty image one.
For ongoing clients, a monthly retainer is better for both sides: a fixed number of images at a fixed price with a fixed turnaround. It smooths your income and removes a quote from every job.
Price your own sessions differently
If you are pricing editing inside your own photography packages rather than selling it as a service, do not itemise it. Clients hire you for finished photographs and a line reading "editing: $180" invites them to ask whether they can skip it.
Instead, build the editing hours into the session fee. A one hour portrait session with 30 delivered images is roughly two to four hours of post-production, and if your package price does not cover that, it is the pricing that needs fixing rather than the editing that needs cutting.
The exception is genuine extras. Additional retouching beyond what is included, a composite the client asked for after delivery, or a rushed turnaround are all legitimately billable, and having a published rate for them means you are not inventing a number under pressure.
Turnaround is part of the price
Standard turnaround for editing work is three to five business days for a normal volume, one to two weeks for a large wedding set. Rush work at 24 to 48 hours carries a 25 to 50 percent premium, and it should, because it displaces everything else in your queue.
State the turnaround on the quote, in business days, starting from when you receive usable files rather than from when the client first emailed. That distinction saves an argument roughly once a quarter, and it matters more as volume grows, since the wait is what clients actually notice.
Build a buffer into whatever you promise. Quoting five days and delivering in three is a much better business than the reverse.
Two things to insist on
A style reference, upfront. Ask for five to ten edited images the client likes before you touch anything. Editing to an unstated preference is how a job goes through four revision rounds and stops being profitable, and it is the same briefing problem as handing your own work to an editor from the other side of the transaction.
A revision limit, in writing. Two rounds included, further rounds at your hourly rate. Almost nobody uses the second round, and the limit exists to stop the rare client who would otherwise use eight.
Get both in the same email as the quote. Editing is one of the few services where the scope is genuinely invisible until someone disagrees about it, and thirty seconds of definition upfront is what keeps the rate you quoted the rate you actually earn.
