Hire Photo Editors in the Philippines

How to Hire the Best Photo Editor

We live in a digital age, and visuals have become more important than ever. Images now have a significant influence on traffic, shares, and rankings, so it’s crucial for businesses and organisations to hire photo editors to build an excellent content marketing strategy and ultimately, to stand out from competitors.

However, for you to be able to hire the best photo editors, you must first understand and acknowledge photography’s significance within your marketing efforts, as well as what photo editors really do and contribute to your team.

Photography is much more than just pointing and shooting. Photographers undergo training to capture emotion, convey quality, and communicate value. However, there is another important person in the visuals department: the photo editor.

Many hold the misconception that photo editors act as photographers, too. However, photo editors mainly work on ideas. They conceptualise what goes into the visuals, which photos will be used, and how they will go with the accompanying text. Generally, their role is to create a rich experience for the reader or the website visitor.

Photo editors are responsible for coordinating assignments as well as approving images. Moreover, they also select, edit, and position photos within a material to elicit the best reactions and responses from the reader.

Visual marketing is crucial for businesses to survive and continually attract visitors and customers, but creating excellent photos is easier said than done. Also, not all of us have the creative eye to check what can be improved, what should be added and what should be removed in visual materials.

Great content without great visuals won’t get as much shares and engagements, so it’s crucial that you start evaluating your marketing efforts immediately and hire photo editors to give your content marketing strategy its much-needed boost.

 

Why should you hire a Photo Editor?

People relate to visual cues faster and better. Also, if your business or organisation is in the food, fashion, retail, or travel industry, professionally edited images should be your top priority in your marketing efforts.

Let’s discuss in detail the benefits and advantages you will get when you hire photo editors for your business needs:

Brand building
Images and photo editing play a significant role in brand building. For example, your business can determine a particular style of editing (such as cropping patterns, subjects used, focusing on particular colours, etc.) to create brand-aware images.

Doing this also helps your customers remember you and your brand while making them feel confident as they avail of your product or service.

Improve sales
The main goal of having a photo editor in your team is to improve the quality of your images. Remember, if you truly want to attract customers, don’t settle with mediocre images to represent your products or services.

Great photo editors can improve your images to make it attractive for your customers, therefore allowing you to leverage better-looking and high-quality images to generate more sales.

Build credibility
46% of people trust businesses with genuine images on their website easier. This is why, having professionally edited images than stock images can be very beneficial to your business, especially during your early days. With great-looking images, you build respectability and credibility without misleading your viewers.

Create a robust social media strategy
As of now, social media is one of the biggest and most effective marketing channels for many businesses. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many others in between, these platforms have successfully brought customers and brands closer. With this, uploading professionally edited images and sharing them through these channels will definitely make your business stand out among the rest.

Customise images for different platforms
Remember different platforms have different natures and audiences, and they fulfil different purposes. One beautiful edited image will not work well on all platforms. Having a photo editor in your team will help you customise your images and re-purpose them so that you get to maximise their impact on multiple platforms.

 

What skills should you look for when hiring Photo Editors?

Let’s take a look into the top practical skills you should look for when screening Photo Editors:

Crop
The crop tool removes the unwanted part of the image. Photo editors shape a rectangle around the area they want to keep; this area inside the rectangle becomes the new image and the rest is removed.

Brightness and contrast
This tool adjusts (increases or decreases) the brights and darks (contrast) as well as the overall brightness of the image. Photo editors who are skilled in using this tool are able to play with the visual impact of the image by combining brightness and contrast settings. For example, using this tool can add emphasis to scenic shots like sunsets.

Saturation
The saturation tool is used to increase the colour and certain hues of an image. This tool can be used to sweeten the colour impact of an image, especially for floral and outdoor images. However, when used in excess, it can cause images to look unnatural and artificial.

Colour adjust
The colour adjust tool is used to adjust and correct the image’s colour temperature. This tool lets photo editors choose a colour-neutral selection (white or grey) in the photo, or make the image “warmer” or “cooler” by tweaking some settings or sliders. This is a handy tool for rescuing photos that have improper colour casts.

Curves and levels
These tools are similar to Brightness and Contrast tools, but with more functionalities. Levels allow photo editors to change the white, mid, and black points of an image, such as pushing the darks darker, or the whites whiter. On the other hand, curves is a more flexible tool that allows photo editors to adjust tones to brighten, darken, add contrast and shift colours.

Layers
Photo editors who are skilled in using layers can use these tools to achieve their desired image quickly and efficiently. Layers can be customised, enhanced, or adjusted to enhance the colour of another layer. Layers can also be used to superimpose items on each other.

Digital skills
Aside from these photo editing skills, it is also crucial to look for digital skills when screening potential photo editors. Photoshop and InDesign skills are especially helpful in performing small corrections or layouts. Strong skills and experience in other photo editing software such as Illustrator, Lightroom, and Bridge, along with at least a basic knowledge of videography and video editing can very much lead you to a great photo editor.

 

How much is the usual rate for Photo Editors?

How much will it cost to hire a photo editor? To help you get started, here’s a quick table summarising the different rates for photo editors from four different countries. The following rates are lifted from Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, and Payscale.

	Average Photo Editor Annual Salary	Average Photo Editor Hourly Rate
United Kingdom	GBP 21,588	GBP 18
United States	USD 39,408	USD 33
Canada	CAD 42,596	CAD 20
Australia	AUS 46,704	AUS 26

While hiring locally is the conventional way to find the needed talents, many businesses and organisations today are opting to hire offshore photo editors to leverage the benefits of outsourcing, such as the hiring flexibility and cost-effective rates.

Trustworthy and well-established outsourcing companies are able to help businesses find and quickly hire photo editors through their massive database of available talents in offshore locations.

Cloud Employee, the UK’s leading outsourcing provider for software development and back-office functions, offers businesses like yours with a client-centred, cost-effective, and risk-free outsourcing services. With us as your outsourcing partner, hiring photo editors to boost your marketing efforts and your business is made more accessible with our affordable offshore rates.

 

What interview techniques should you use to hire the best Photo Editors?

As discussed in the previous sections, photo editors have a wide range of expertise. Generally, they create photo content in print and web publications, and they also coordinate with teams of photographers, designers, and content writers. They can work for websites, print publications, or advertising agencies, so you have to be specific about what skill set and expertise you’re looking for in a photo editor.

To help you know your candidates more, here are some questions you can ask during your interviews:

Work-related questions

• What is your favourite subject?
• What image editing software have you used before? Which do you prefer the most?  
• How has your work experience prepared you for this position?
• How do you keep yourself motivated in repetitive tasks like editing and improving images or managing photo equipment?
• How do you adapt photo content for different audiences?
• How would you give feedback to a low-performing team member?
• How do you motivate your team to ensure you meet deadlines?
• What would be your suggestions for upcoming projects for our publication/website/social media page?
• Do you use social media to compliment your work? How?

Behaviour-related questions
Take a look at your candidate’s portfolio, and from there ask your interviewee to talk about one project and their experience.

• What was your role in this project?
• How much time did you spend to create it?
• How did you collaborate with the other team members?
• What were your guidelines and resources?
• What is your favourite piece of work from your portfolio?
• Was there an instance where you met conflict in your team? How did you address it?

 

How can Cloud Employee help you?

Marketing is an essential part of any business. Strong marketing efforts help with customer education, customer engagement, and branding; to simply put it, a strong marketing strategy helps businesses sell their products or services. Great copies and written content will be useless without effective visuals to accompany them.

As you focus on the core of your business, adding in marketing tasks such as photo editing may be putting more pressure on you and your team. For businesses with a relatively small team, outsourcing their photo editing needs is an effective strategy to boost their marketing efforts while allowing the team to focus on the critical aspects of the business—all at reduced costs.

With our custom-recruitment process and dedicated hiring model, our expert team at Cloud Employee can help you find and hire expert photo editors in the Philippines fast and risk-free.

To start hiring your photo editor, send us your staffing requirements such as the essential skills, years of experience, and other important details. Our team of expert recruiters then conducts a custom search for available and qualified candidates. We get back to you with shortlisted CVs, and from this, you personally handpick the photo editors you want to interview. You gain control throughout the whole hiring process without paying for any recruitment fees.

The photo editor you hire with Cloud Employee is a dedicated staff—this means that they work on your project alone. They report to you directly from our Philippine offices, mirroring your working hours and following your processes and standards.

As your outsourcing partner, Cloud Employee takes care of the workspace, hardware, software, internet connection, and IT support. We also handle all work permits, licensing, insurance, taxes, HR, and payroll so you can focus on growing your business and managing your team.

What is the dedicated hiring model?

Here at Cloud Employee, we employ the Dedicated Hiring Model which is perfect for companies who would like to outsource their photo editing needs with control over the hiring process.

This model is a flexible outsourcing model that helps companies avoid the risks and problems that can be commonly experienced in traditional outsourcing setups. With this model, clients gain close control over the hiring process and find the talent they need anytime their business should require it. Ultimately, our business model effectively reduces difficulties and issues in communication and coordination among geographically-dispersed teams.

Another advantage of the dedicated hiring model is that, with this model, companies and businesses can easily scale their outsourced photo editing team any time during a project.

Advantages
This dedicated hiring model…

• Is great for long-term projects with indefinite scope and details; also works well with short-term projects with a well-defined and specific scope.
• Can offer predictable costs and expenses even for projects with unfixed scope and requirements.
• Suits businesses and organisations which want direct communication with their offshore photo editing team.
• Allows clients to personally monitor their offshore photo editor’s progress and work quality.
• Provides clients with an offshore photo editor that effectively becomes an extension of their in-house team. The offshore photo editor works exclusively for their clients—they follow their processes, guidelines, standards, and goals.

These benefits, along with our broad experience and expertise in the IT outsourcing industry has helped us provide startups, SMEs, and enterprises from different parts of the world with a low-risk, cost-effective, and efficacious alternative for hiring the best photo editors.

Moreover, we provide all these services and benefits at competitive industry rates, which is why more than a hundred businesses continue to choose us and our business model as their outsourcing partner.

WHY HIRE OFFSHORE PHOTO EDITORS WITH CLOUD EMPLOYEE

• Access to the best talent in the Philippines
• End-to-end client control from custom-recruitment to direct staffing management
• 100% lead generation specialists working on mirrored working hours
• Full client support from our After Care Team
• Savings of up to 65% or more