Digital Enhancment Pricing? What to charge?

[ryno4youth]

Hey Pros,
I am currently trying to figure out how to work out digital enhancments into my pricing and workflow. How do you guys work out charing for your enhancment services? Do you make the client decside right away what they want before they order and then do the work, or do you do some creative work the the images and then charge them afterwards? How much should I charge? When I mean enhancements I mean more then B&W or Sepia, I mean borders, B&W w/ color showing through, etc. I want to keep my enhancment time down, because right now, I am doing the work and they the client is ordering what they want, so I find myself (and my wife) doing several enhancments of almost all the images. Can you say "time consuming?" Any thoughts? Thanks.

[chtgrubbs]

This can be a tricky marketing technique. Are you showint them final prints or screen images? You might make more sales by showing them the enhanced version, telling them what the extra cost is and then if they don't go for it take it away and show them the plain version. Having something taken away is a powerful emotional wrench and often a customer will want it back when they see the plain version. If you are showing screen images all you have invested is your time, if prints then you will have the cost of your time and the print cost so you will have to determine if the extra sales warrant the potential waste. Probably you should charge more for the services in order to make up for losses.

Or you could just make up a menu of "Special Enhancements" with examples and prices and try selling them at ordering time. Or do both, try selling at order time and if they don't buy use the above technique.

If you want to keep your time down offer a limited menu and charge dearly for them. Make it worth your while to put in the extra time. Figure a good rate of return, maybe $50-75/hr and charge appropriately according to how long the enhancements will take. If your still too busy, up the prices. It's always better to work less time for more pay!

[ryno4youth]

Very good advise. Does anyone have any real world examples of pricing? It seems to me that by asking the client what enhancments they want, you are asking them to be creative, when they are paying the photography to be. I just had a client tell me to do what I thought would be good, then she ended up not ordering from several of them. Wasted time? Thanks for the help guys.

[DwightMcCann]

I think you need a portfolio of "before and after" images. Just three or four shots with zits removed, background blurred, skin smoothed, objects cloned out, colors saturated, whatever it is that you do. Then indicate it is $25 (or $50 or whatever) per image no matter how many prints they want of that image. To make it even sweeter you can indicate that reorders later will include the initial enhancements for free.

Please keep coming back here with updates if you do anything in this area whether it works or not. I think this is an area that many of us would like to explore ... truth to tell, I'd never thought about charging "extra" and I sure know it is time consuming!