Have you ever wondered what a photo would look like if you paid someone $0.25 to retouch it? How about a $5 retouch or a $10 retouch?
If you think such a notion is crazy, you're mostly right...
In the video below, Irene Rudnyk found out what the results would look like at these three price points, and, let's be honest, the quality is commensurate with the price.
As Irene explains in the video, she turned to Fiverr, the popular freelancing platform, where people offer extraordinarily cheap services like photo retouching.
As she quickly discovered, Irene had her choice of more than 6,000 freelancers that offered photo retouching services.
She ended up choosing three people at different price points and tiers to compare their work.
The image below is the original RAW file that Irene sent to each freelancer:
In her work request, Irene asked that each retoucher make the image warm and vibrant with clean skin and bright eyes. She was going for a fall-like look, with the model's hair a little redder to match the background.
The $0.25 retouching job came back looking like this:
Clearly, things went off the rails here, but what can you expect for a quarter?
Editor's Tip: Your best photos deserve a spot on your wall. See what your photos look like as fine art.
The $5 retouching job was a vast improvement:
As Irene notes, the skin tones in this shot are actually quite good.
And then the $10 retouching job:
This one is definitely more vibrant than the $5 version, though Irene makes a good point that the skin tones in this edit aren't quite as good as the $5 version.
In a conclusion that's not shocking at all, Irene recommends avoiding Fiverr for retouching services.
Clearly, the $0.25 freelancer had no idea what they were doing. The other two had some good qualities, but if you're paying $5 or $10 for one image edit, it should be a perfect representation of what you wanted.
Here's Irene's edit of the same shot:
I don't know about you, but I think Irene's version is vastly superior to any of the others.
Perhaps she should start offering retouching serves on Fiverr!
Be sure to check out Irene's YouTube channel for tons of excellent photography tutorials.
Via PetaPixel