Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: chrisstraley on October 12, 2009, 07:55:05 pm
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Has anyone used any of the companies out of India to do clipping path work for them...Or a friend. Any experience? Good or bad. Thanks
Chris
chris@chrisstraley.com
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I've had pretty mixed result. I use them when I have hundreds of files of pretty simple shapes. For more complex things I need to factor in time and money to go through the paths and tweek them. Can still work out cheaper/faster than if I do it all myself, but can get frustrating.
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I had dinner with a client a few night ago. He was telling me about a prepress house he uses that uses a place in India. They'll do up to 1000 images overnight for $4 each. As Rick said, for pretty straight forword work, I think it's great if you have a tone of images. For softer edge work, I'd rather do it myself and knock out the background and have the image on a transparent background (I then save as a CMYK - PSD, because a layer TIFF doesn't seem to hold). For something like that, I wouldn't use India.
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I get a lot of emails from India saying they can edit my photos for certain fees, which vary based on the degree of editing I want (ie masking/clipping). I can see why people would want their images editing cheap but I personally don't want anyone editing my photos except for myself and my wife. It would take too much time and thus money to explain how I want every file to be done.
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I know a few people in my area, including myself that have used them. Most recently, a pearl necklace with silver links between each pearl. Sent in for silo and they did a very good job. Needed just a bit of cleanup. Would have taken me hours to do!
Fast turn around, and great prices
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Any concern of them using your images or selling them to someone else in another part of the world where you wouldn't discover it?
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Hi guys,
I do out sourcing work here in Australia. I look at this a bit like when you are looking to invest your money with a broker or bank. First there needs to be a relationship of trust. Some peoples images, that i work on are worth 10's of thousands of dollars to them. They place their trust in me, that these images don't go elsewhere. That i treat them with integraty.
Some people I meet face to face, others I never meet, but they have a third party who have dealt with me before, and have therefore recommended my service.
Now, there is nothing stopping you from developing a relationship with a company in India or the north pole. I do work for people in Asia, and I am in Australia.
You sometimes choose to use this service because of price, mostly because its cheaper ...and you are a real tight as*, or because someone somewhere else in the world can do it better, or a combination of both. Most people do it because they can use their own time doing what they do best, which is taking photos.
However, there isn't any gurantee that your images wont end up somewhere else, its very much up to the individual who you deal with and their integraty. Out sourcing is a great concept and can help grow your business, often with a known cost up front. but to make it really sucessful you need to develop a relationship with that person/company just like you did with your lab, when you used to send in your film.
I would say, give it a go.
Henrik
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I've had very good results outsourcing clipping paths for about $2 ea. Some were very complex too. Sure, some need a tweak here or there, but they probably would if you were paying 10x that amount too.
FTP them in the evening, get them back the next day (I only send 10-20 out at a time. Larger quantities might take more time).
Most places offer a free test, and the quality of the tests have been pretty indicative of their normal.
Are my images are being used somewhere unbeknown to me? Who knows. But probably no worse than finished work being stolen off your website.
BTW, my advice is to just send a medium quality jpeg, then drag the path onto your working TIFF, PSD, etc.
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BTW, my advice is to just send a medium quality jpeg, then drag the path onto your working TIFF, PSD, etc.
May not even need to send them the entire file .. if you wanted a sky clipped out I suppose you could just crop out everything below that didn't apply, then paste the path into the full document when you get it back.
Anyone have some recommendations for these services?
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May not even need to send them the entire file .. if you wanted a sky clipped out I suppose you could just crop out everything below that didn't apply, then paste the path into the full document when you get it back.
Yes but it's a simple shift+drag for perfect registration if your crop and pixel dimensions are exactly duplicate. If your proxy image is sized/cropped differently it can be a nightmare to register the path to your working image.
Anyone have some recommendations for these services?
I've been very happy with these guys.
http://www.sblgraphics.com/clipping_complexity.aspx (http://www.sblgraphics.com/clipping_complexity.aspx)
Most of my stuff has been in the "complexity 4" territory, and their price is negotiable.
This is clipping paths I'm talking about, my experiment with their cloning was less satisfying.
These guys contacted me and offered $1 ea, and their free trial produced a good result, but I stayed with the above because I was pleased with their service and they matched the price.
http://photoshopclippingpath.us/ (http://photoshopclippingpath.us/)
Seriously, the quality of work you get with these outfits for the price is just unbelievable.
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Yes but it's a simple shift+drag for perfect registration if your crop and pixel dimensions are exactly duplicate. If your proxy image is sized/cropped differently it can be a nightmare to register the path to your working image.
I've been very happy with these guys.
http://www.sblgraphics.com/clipping_complexity.aspx (http://www.sblgraphics.com/clipping_complexity.aspx)
Most of my stuff has been in the "complexity 4" territory, and their price is negotiable.
This is clipping paths I'm talking about, my experiment with their cloning was less satisfying.
These guys contacted me and offered $1 ea, and their free trial produced a good result, but I stayed with the above because I was pleased with their service and they matched the price.
http://photoshopclippingpath.us/ (http://photoshopclippingpath.us/)
Seriously, the quality of work you get with these outfits for the price is just unbelievable.
I assumed you could simply crop off the bottom or top, then when the work comes back just use canvas size to get things back to normal for easy registration. Wouldn't work for many images I guess, thinking mostly of masking out the sky in landscapes for a simple HDR. I suppose you could also just add a bunch of copyright text to the parts of the image that aren't affected. Not sure if it's worth the hassle, maybe they are completely trustworthy (heck, maybe they wouldn't even like my images anyway )
Thanks for the sources, will definitely give them a try. I hate doing this kind of stuff.
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Interesting as I have a few hundred images I need clipping. As I searched around I came a cross 1 site that had an image of mine as an example I contacted them a while back but they are still using it. I infact had the image cutout but by another company.