Cheap Boudoir Photographers
The quality compromises photographers make to cheat costs down and offer sessions for less.
You’ve probably been looking into doing a boudoir photo shoot and checked out a few photographers. After clicking around you start to wonder how much a boudoir photo shoot with this photographer will cost vs another photographer. Some don’t share their price menus publicly which is super frustrating (you can view mine here), but for those who do, you’ve probably come to realize that some are significantly cheaper than others. Why is that and what really is the difference when comparing the final artwork or experience?
Excluding novice photographers and or those with bad taste, the simple fact is that inexpensive boudoir photographers are usually cutting corners on quality when producing your final images in an effort to save time. This saved time is usually passed on to you in the form of cheaper packages and lower quality final images. The photographers that do this are then often forced to take on a volume business model (think McDonalds) to become profitable.
Yum fast food boudoir… You do you if a drive through boudoir experience sounds good to you, but for the rest of us, here are the 5 primary ways boudoir studios cut corners in quality as a way to offer cheaper sessions.
They limit session time rather than charging only for the images you love.
They outsource the editing of your photos to cheap, low end retouchers.
They choose lower quality labs to produce your final artwork.
This post might feel like inside baseball of the boudoir industry, but I think it’s super important to help everyone understand exactly what they’re getting so you can better compare when choosing which boudoir photographer you should go with.
Why paying for session time is a bad idea.
It’s super common when looking though boudoir photographer’s packages that most give a session time limit. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, however more often then not, this session duration is too short to get quality captures and provide a good experience.
Two hours of shoot time is pretty standard in most instances however I’ve seen some photographers that advertise their base packages with as little as 30 minutes time in front of the camera. What do you think of when you hear the term rushed artwork? Would you expect the best pictures you’ve ever seen of yourself from that photographer? Pretty unlikely.
Time limits I find inject extra anxiety in photo shoots as everyone worries about extra charges for extra time or finishing up before the next client comes in. In some instances short session times are presented as special offers promising a great deal. Many photographers brand these short sessions as “boudoir marathons” where they schedule 8-12 women a day and basically run though them very quickly in an assembly line fashion. With maybe an hour total between hair, makeup, your photo shoot and selecting your favorite images, it’s pretty unrealistic to expect good quality photos from this type of arrangement.
In my experience most women that come to see me are already super nervous just about the idea of being photographed intimately. To add the extra pressure of a rushed experience I’ve found is exactly the opposite approach of how to get exceptionally high quality final images for them.
This is why every photo shoot with me is an all day experience without ridged timelines. On an ideal day I like to start your makeover at 10AM. Your makeover with my makeup artist will take roughly 2 hours in most cases. Then from roughly 12-5PM is when we would photograph your session. If you’re paying attention that’s already a 7 hour day and doesn’t account for the time I take to clean up all the equipment I bring to your location.
Some sessions go longer, and some are cut shorter depending on how my client is feeling. I always try and give everyone the time they need to get the most compelling set of images I can for them. In fact, the cost of your session is exactly the same weather I photograph you for 2 hours or 6 hours on your session date since I only charge you for the images you absolutely love from your session.
In contrast to the 30 minute sessions I mentioned above, I spend roughly 15-20min with everyone before their session teaching them how to pose for their specific body type so they look their best. I also show them how to manipulate their expression so they can learn to convey sensuality non verbally. Just your makeover before your session with me is literally 4x longer than some of the boudoir sessions I’ve see advertised! It really makes you question how good that makeover will be!
Short session durations are typically used by boudoir photographers to schedule multiple appointments per day/week so they can operate on a volume business model. This means that they make less money per client, but more money overall by making up the difference with a higher volume of women. This business model inherently sacrifices quality in favor of quantity. To use the restaurant analogy again, It’s literally a question of whether you want a meal from Arby’s or one prepared by a world class chef.
Pay only for the images you absolutely love instead!
I’ve long held the belief that I don’t want to charge my clients for the time I spend with them during their photo shoot. I’d much rather they only purchase the images they love from their sessions. With this philosophy the better job I do when capturing a clients images, the more she will choose to buy. This philosophy inherently makes me want to do the best job I can for every one of my clients.
Compare this philosophy to boudoir photographers who charge for session time. Most have packages you pre pay for, and usually more time with the photographer means a more expensive package. On the surface this might seem to make sense, but since you’re paying the same whether or not you like your images after your photo shoot, there’s literally less financial incentive for the photographer to do the best they can for you. They’re already paid whether they do a good job for you or not.
With the A La Carte model I use, my client is in full control over how much she ultimately chooses to spend. You can literally come to your reveal and not buy anything if you don’t like your images. Pre-paid packages based on time with the photographer inherently don’t guarantee that you will love everything the they will produce for you. I’ve literally had women come to me telling me they had spent thousands of dollars on prior photo shoots and not been happy with a single image. It happens way more than you probably think!
TL;DR:
Short session durations don’t allow enough time for a quality experience which typically leads to fewer and or lower quality final images from your session. Boudoir sessions with short session durations often operate on a volume business model and by nature don’t allow enough time to get the best photos for you.
Do yourself a favor and find a photographer who allows you to purchase only the images you absolutely love from your photo shoot instead buying time in front of the camera.
Beautiful edits take time
Retouching is a common area photographers love to sacrifice quality in exchange for time. Remember that rushed artwork thing we talked about earlier? Well, imagine yourself as the focus of this rushed artwork. Not good right? Well this is exactly what you can expect when you decide to have your session photographed by a cheaper boudoir photographer.
As it turns out, editing for anything larger than your phone is a pretty labor intensive part of any photo shoot if you want high end, editorial grade images. Editing naturally needs to be more finessed the larger you print. To save time and drive down costs, most photographers use a few techniques to help speed up the editing process assuming you will only view your image small. All of these tactics will negatively affect the quality of your final photos.
Some photographers try to cheaply buy back their time by outsourcing their image editing to low quality retouchers. Others bypass the retouching step all together and pitch you on the the idea of no Photoshop for your final images. I’ve even seen a few professionals use ham handed Facetune like techniques to quickly blur out skin texture. To better understand why all of these techniques typically give inferior results let’s look at each approach in more detail.
Outsourcing your edits
Unlike the competition, I never outsource your edits. I do this so you know that the images you will get will be consistent with what I show in my portfolio.
To be fair, not all third party retouchers are bad, but most cheap boudoir photographers aren’t hiring high quality artists for this step. Most hire companies or free lancers from less affluent countries to retouch their photos for somewhere between $2.50 and $10 per photo. Since editing photos is typically a flat fee, these edits are often very poor quality as the retouchers get paid the same whether they do a great job or a passable job.
At one time I was actually very curious if I could outsource skin editing in particular to help reduce my workload while retaining quality final edits. As it turns out I was able to get high quality edits using this technique when I found the right people and paid them what they needed to spend the time on them. Ultimately however, I decided against using this practice as I found the time savings to be marginal at best over just doing the edits myself.
As it turns out when you outsource things like editing, ethically you still need to go in and inspect the work before it heads off to the client. This meant opening each file and inspecting the work after completion.
Even among the better retouchers every project still had at least a few images that needed to go back for revision upon inspection. So although I was saving time editing, I was now spending more time supervising editors when I could just do everything right the first time myself. This back and forth also extended the time between photo shoot and reveal for my clients as I would wait for revisions and dealt with time zone differences.
Often times I would find myself just correcting skin retouching errors from the retouchers myself when I would go in to color grade the finished images (color grading should never be outsourced IMHO as this is an artistic decision). So although I was saving time by outsourcing, I decided to not outsource the editing for my boudoir sessions and retain full control over the process. Frankly it felt like there was too big of a chance to let quality mistakes fall though the cracks with more people involved in the process.
To further muddy the waters on this topic, I’ve actually attended seminars from photographers who told me they personally edit all the images they show in their portfolio but then outsource all other client images. This bait and switch is much more pervasive throughout the industry than you might think. Make sure to ask your photographer who is retouching your images and make sure that it is the same person who edited the images they show in their portfolio.
TL:DR Many (probably most) inexpensive boudoir photographers are outsourcing the editing of your photos to low quality retouchers in other countries in an effort to save time. Make sure you check out full res files and or physical artwork from some of the photographer’s past clients sessions prior to booking your photo shoot to make sure the editing is done well.
no photoshop
Some boudoir photographers offer photo shoots with no retouching. Some even try to sell people on the idea of no retouching with the claim that Photoshop makes you something you aren’t. This sounds really noble until you look though their portfolio and realize it’s pretty light on showcasing the moms of 3 and few older than 25.
Since the vast majority of my clients are moms and wives ranging from 30 to 60, most of them want retouching for the same reasons they wear makeup. Retouching isn’t about making you something you’re not, so much as it’s about enhancing your features and making you look your best.
My goal for my clients is to produce high quality images like the best photographers used to do for all the great magazines back in the day. To achieve this level of perfection, retouching is pretty much required even among those that take the best care of themselves.
All of this said I’m a HUGE fan of Lightroom only edits that leave things less “perfect” and more raw. Both methods are fantastic and each has their place, but the highly polished editorial look is much more labor intensive and thus more expensive.
Whichever style you prefer, it’s important to remember that retouching has been around about as long as cameras have. We just used to do it differently back in the day with techniques like airbrushing instead of digital edits on computers like we do today.
TL;DR Ultimately your decision to have your boudoir images retouched is entirely up to you. Even though there’s no right answer here, I’ve found that the vast majority of my clients want retouching. Whichever way you decide, make sure you like the images in the photographers portfolio and that there are women showcased in it that are similar to your age, body type and life circumstance (mothers etc.).
Quick and dirty retouching
Using much more refined techniques then most, I hand retouch all images myself and invest somewhere around an hour per edit on my clients images.
There’s quite a few techniques I’ve seen photographers use to speed up skin retouching. I’ve played with all of them and can instantly spot the shitty, sorry “budget friendly” edits even when they’re super small on mobile social feeds.
Without getting too far into the weeds about how these quick edits are done, these techniques basically rely on blurring skin texture and or color tones so imperfections are “smoothed out.” All you really need to know if you’re not interested in the details is that this method looks super fake-o-rific when you zoom in or blow the image up to anything larger than the size of your phone.
These methods can look good enough to the untrained eye scrolling a social feed and can be done very quickly at a much lower cost. You can see exactly how these quick skin softening edits are done here if you’d like to know the details about how this is done.
With the popularity of social media and the desire to keep up with the demands of the algorithm even the once great magazine publications, who’s quality was once the gold standard everyone looked up to, allows photos with these sub par skin edits on their feeds.
Instead of creating (or curating) only the highest quality images like they used to, they now sacrifice quality editing so they can post stuff that looks good enough for a mobile feed 1-3 times a day.
As it turns out most boudoir photographers are following suit for similar reasons. To cheaply market themselves, photographers choose to do 5-10 minute quick edits using these quick skin smoothing tactics so they can continue to post regularly and feed their social algorithms yummy, yummy newness.
This desire for more eyeballs further incentivizes budget photographers to lower the quality of their edits or outsource their retouching like we mentioned earlier. These quick edits allow them to generate continuous streams of new content faster and cheaper at the expense of quality.
In contrast to the 10 minute edit, every image I present to my clients get’s as much attention as I think it needs to look it’s best. Using more refined techniques, the time I invest in editing vary’s greatly based on many factors. On average I’d estimate I spend about and hour per edit on most of my clients images.
Most people honestly probably can’t tell the difference between high quality edits and super quick ones when scrolling their Instagram feeds. This is mostly due to the physical size of the device they’re viewing them on. That said, if you were to look at final albums side by side of higher and lesser quality artists, I have no doubt that everyone reading this would notice the quality difference instantly.
TL;DR:
High quality editing is fundamental to creating timeless images you’ll still love decades from now. That said if you’re just looking for someone to create quick images to send to your significant other’s phone or something like that, this might be a good place for you to compromise if you want to save a buck.
Final artwork as beautiful as your images
As we’ve already covered, cutting corners when producing your images is one way to save costs for your boudoir photo shoot. Another very common way to save a few bucks is to have your final artwork printed for a lower quality presentation.
Since the vast majority of the cost difference between high and low quality artwork comes from the labor of the photo shoot and editing of the images, I see little reason to skimp on producing lower quality albums (for instance) of my clients sessions. It seems a little silly to me to put in all that work and not print the images on the best thing I can, but that said it’s something I see most photographers doing anyway, so you should be very aware of this when comparing artists.
When comparing the final artwork offerings from photographers you’re interested in, consider the following:
Are wall art prints luster coated to offer UV protection?
Are the prints they’re offering pre-mounted to help prevent warping or wrinkling over time?
Does the photographer offer fine art printing?
Are the albums they offer lay flat?
Are the artists albums printed on true photo paper and mounted?
Do the album cover options include high quality genuine leathers?
All of these questions are a good place to start, when trying to determine what level of quality your artist is offering. That said, this list means nothing if the quality control of the lab is questionable. Many labs will tick all of the above boxes and then have problems with the color accuracy of their prints or quality control issues when albums go out for delivery. I know because I’ve personally experienced QC issues myself before finding all my awesome vendors I now rely on.
When I first started my business I literally spent thousands of dollars buying artwork samples from quite a few different labs to determine the best vendors to make my wall art, albums, folio boxes and retro viewers. After much trial and error I found not only the labs who where making the highest quality final artwork, but those with quality control so good I could trust them to send the pieces directly to my clients.
TL;DR:
Whenever possible it’s important to meet your photographer before booking your session to check out some of the artwork they’ve created for past clients. Getting to see this artwork in person from past sessions will give you a VERY good idea as to the quality you can expect from your own session.
