Originally posted by Culture We can all agree that it takes dedication and skill. So can one buy the skill from somewhere else.
Sure, you can buy the skill from somewhere - but they won't make the same choices as you, and the resulting images are no longer entirely your own work, IMHO. It becomes their interpretation of what you were trying to convey - like a band performing a song you wrote
Plus, you become dependent on that particular outsource partner to deliver consistency. Can they guarantee to (a) always be available when you need them, (b) always have the same people work on your shots, to eliminate personal stylistic differences, (c) deliver within an acceptable time frame, (d) keep the costs manageable, etc.? Or will there be times when they can't guarantee those things and you have to use a different service and risk not getting what you wanted, when you have a client delivery due imminently?
Originally posted by Culture When you do commercial work like weddings, It can be quite tedious. There can easily be a problem of consistency. Gimp for example does not have an easy batch processing feature.
I don't shoot weddings, nor am I a pro photographer. However, extensive editing in GIMP or Photoshop (for example), as opposed to RAW processing in something like Darktable or Lightroom, sounds like overkill and over-complication for a wedding shoot, except perhaps for one or two individual art shots out of the entire portfolio. You're not looking for absolute perfection in every shot (which, in any case, is subjective) but to achieve a very good standard for the client whilst keeping your processing time reasonable. Is that not so?
With Lightroom (and, increasingly, Darktable) I can get a photograph more or less ready in a few minutes if I'm working manually, or under a minute if I use some of the presets I've created. I appreciate that achieving consistency over a portfolio from one shoot might be more time-consuming, but not especially so, surely?
In any case, my guess is that most outsourced processing services (for digital photography) use a number of presets in Lightroom, then tweak individual aspects, with perhaps a bit of re-touching work in Photoshop for some but not all photos. I seriously doubt they'd do more than that when working on an entire event portfolio, as the man-power and time involved would become very costly both to them and their clients.