Freelance photoshoppers

I recently got back from a once-in-a-lifetime trip (NEVER AGAIN!) and have a mass (1600) of photos which I want to whittle down and put into an album.
The downside is that I have absolutely no knowledge of photo-editing and I think that if I were able to take the best ones, if it were possible to ask/employ someone to touch them up (some the lighting isn't ideal so we're a bit pastey, some are a bit dark, etc).
I know there are some awesome photographers on here, but was wondering how to go about it if I wanted to employ someone to do the touching up. Nothing significant like removing spots/blemishes, just making them nice? Ideally I would like to share my favourite 200 photos with a view to working with someone to reduce it to 50-60 for a really lovely photo album to give to my mother for Christmas.
Any thoughts, advice, recommendations and expected cost etc much appreciated. I have a facebook link of 125 but not sure I want to stick it online, but happy to PM anyone who's interested in doing the work.
The downside is that I have absolutely no knowledge of photo-editing and I think that if I were able to take the best ones, if it were possible to ask/employ someone to touch them up (some the lighting isn't ideal so we're a bit pastey, some are a bit dark, etc).
I know there are some awesome photographers on here, but was wondering how to go about it if I wanted to employ someone to do the touching up. Nothing significant like removing spots/blemishes, just making them nice? Ideally I would like to share my favourite 200 photos with a view to working with someone to reduce it to 50-60 for a really lovely photo album to give to my mother for Christmas.
Any thoughts, advice, recommendations and expected cost etc much appreciated. I have a facebook link of 125 but not sure I want to stick it online, but happy to PM anyone who's interested in doing the work.
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There are lots of cheap/free editing packages that you could try on a sample photo to see if you would want to do the job yourself. GIMP is one such package which has some good 'auto' features which will correct a lot of the obvious errors easily with little input from you.
What camera did you use for the photos? Sometimes the camera limits what can be done with the final image particularly if you're trying to recover detail from highlights or shadows.
You can use presets to just add a bit of contrast/vibrancy or whatever across all your photos
If you want to do a little bit more you can develop one photo and apply the same settings across a group of photos. It also has lens correction settings for a wide range of cameras and excellent tools for tagging and cataloguing your photos. Importantly it is very intuitive and doesn't have a steep learning curve
It is not cheap but you can probably get a trial and export your jpegs. They also have a monthly licence subscription for $10 so you could use that and then cancel when you no longer need it.
Photo editing is fun with Lightroom so I would recommend doing it yourself.
The Olympus XZ-1 and XZ-2 are excellent premium compacts. You will be able to edit the files much more if you have shot in RAW, especially in adjusting white balance and sensitive noise removal/sharpening
It is easy to publish collections of photos to whichever photo sharing site you use. You can add a photo to the Flickr/Facebook/Instagram collection and then click publish.
I think the issue is that I don't really have an eye for this. I really enjoyed using the D3100 and trying to use the settings, with limited success. I got the XZ-1 on the cheap, but to be honest I don't really have a clue how to use it and get those 'warm' pictures which DSLRs get just using auto settings.
It's something I certainly want to learn and $10 isn't much, so I could have a stab. Plus the household has a new iMac which could make light work of this.
I tend to delete the duff ones, then if some are similar keep the best one and delete the rest and batch process an "Autofix" setting for posting on Facebook. The vast majority of the public will be perfectly happy with the results and that process is not too hard to learn or achieve.
I then properly post process my "keepers" during the winter evenings as a personal project and use those shots for albums and calendars.
Getting someone to do it for you could prove costly.
Edit:- iPhoto on the Mac is basic compared to Pro tools but more than adequate for your requirements.
I am not sure. You have no chance.
seanoconn
If you want to see a very small handful, along with my 'guess the objects' they are linked below.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/
A lot of printing places have an automatic fix thing now and it can work okay - worth a look. When you upload them they just do some sort of auto enhancement.
For future trips, I would really recommend using the camera in manual with auto white balance, as it makes life a lot easier once you get used to it and it really doesn't take long to learn/guess the manual exposure.
Anything auto will get it badly wrong a lot of the time, no matter how expensive the gear.
For processing lots of images, use the manufacturers software or better still, use a demo of lightroom, as it's now very good with Nikon raw files(it used to be awful).
Good luck.
ViewNX is the free SW you get with a Nikon - very good for quick editing & easy to use
I simple add pictures to a 1 page powerpoint presentation then print in A4 on good photo paper before putting in my album.
I have 2 simple rules : Is it a GREAT photo ? Is is capturing an experience you want to remember ? if no, delete !
As others have said, be REALLY picky about the ones that you want to edit as it will be time consuming. Then make sure that you don't have any distractions from kids/wife/dogs/cats/hamster. If you want to go back to the other photos, then there will be plenty of long cold dark evenings coming up when you can do that.
..and where was this 'Safari'?
Oh. Safari was in Botswana.
Looks like a Vitus Carbon 9.
Bet you were a bit sad to have let that go.
The older I get, the better I was.