Pricing: paper photos vs electronic?

[Nimitz]

Anyone have any general guidelines (or places I can go look) about pricing hard copy photos for clients vs providing them the image digitally. I have pricing down for hard copy photos but I have a portrait shoot coming up shortly in which the clients may want an electronic copy of the image instead and I have no idea where to start for pricing. Thanks

 

[fido dog]

I do horse shows. The 8x10 hard copy is sold for $45. If they want a full resolution copy in digital form it's $180 per image. We will do quantity discounts though.

Hope this helps.

 

[Nimitz]

Thanks. I assume you charge less if they want low res versions?

 

[Big Mike]

You could look at it this way...
If you give/sell them the digital file...they will make prints from that, rather than buying them from you. So you should charge as much for the file, as you would have expected to make in print sales.

Now, technically speaking...just because you give them the file, it does not give them the right to print or copy it...but realistically, how would you ever enforce that? So if you do sell them the file, you might as well sell the the rights to make their own prints and charge them for that right.

If they want low res files, that may be a different question...because they shouldn't be able to make nice prints from low res files. One problem with that, is that many people don't understand that. They may go ahead and make prints...the prints will look like crap...and the blame will fall back onto you. Even if you do give them high res files, you are not assured that they will prints them well.

On top of this, you have to consider that making copies of prints isn't hard these days. You could sell them a print and they could scan it and make their own reprints. This is not legal but they either don't know or don't care. This is one reason why I like to just sell the digital files and I usually include good quality 4x6 prints so that they know what a good quality print will look like. That's the end of the job...and I don't have to wait for them to order reprints etc.

 

[Nimitz]

Yeah, I agree. A lot of people these days seem to think that by just acquiring the digital image they will be able to make there own high res, large size prints by going to CVS ... I don't have any problem with selling people the digital image knowing what they will do with it - I just want to be able to charge a fair price since usually once they have it you won't be selling them any reprints. Maybe coming up with a price for a print + the digial image is the way to go. Like you siad, they get to see what a high quality print should look like and they get it digitally so they can do other things with it.

 

[fido dog]

We charge $20 for a 72 dpi copy for web use. Most folks are just looking for something they can put on thier site to advertise with. The high res copys they can print from, make wallpaper.....whatever. Most (if not all) of our overseas customers will buy a full res image to print from at home. We let them know that that's what it's for. We send a lot of images to ad designers at full res for a customer fee of $35.

We have had people call and say that the web image looks like crap when they print it. We have to let them know that's not what it's for! AND WE FREAKIN' TELL THEM THAT FROM THE START!!......JEEZ!

 

[fmw]

Commercial photographers normally bill time and expenses. So bill time and expenses.

 

[Nimitz]

Thanks all. I like the idea of charging one price for prints, another for low res image & a 3rd for high res & maybe even throwing in a med size print with the high res image so they can see what it should look like. Might actually cut down on some of the "hey this pic looks like crap when i printed it" comments but probably not . Most people only comprehend about 20% of what they hear ...