How to Handle Client Photo Revision Requests

Read the whole list once before you answer anything. Then put each line in a bin. The bin decides who pays, how fast you turn it around, and what you say.

One reply covers all three. Acknowledge the corrections and give a date. Name which items are preferences and say what the included round covers. Quote the retouching separately, as a small piece of work with a price, so the client can say yes or no without feeling refused.

A correction is a defect measured against the standard of the work you sold. A green cast on one frame when the rest of the set is neutral. A sensor spot in the sky. A blink you missed while culling. Two photos from the same setup where one is a stop brighter than the other.

These are free, and they should be fast. Fixing four frames costs you twenty minutes. Explaining why they are acceptable costs you a week of email and the client's confidence in the rest of the gallery. Speed here also buys you standing later: a photographer who fixed the real problem in a day has the credibility to say no to the body reshaping request on Friday.

Do not negotiate this bin. If the client is right, say so plainly, fix it, and put the corrected file back where the original was.

A preference is a request for a different photograph, not a better one. The grade is cooler than they imagined. They want the horizon straighter than you framed it. They want the whole set in black and white. None of these mean you did the job badly. They mean taste is involved, and taste is infinite unless someone puts a number on it.

The number has to exist before the gallery goes out. A boundary invented after the client has already asked reads as a penalty. The same boundary written at booking reads as a normal term of business, because that is what it is.

Inside the included round, be generous and quick. Outside it, quote. A client who wants a second full pass on the grade is asking for hours of your week, and hours of your week have a price.

Object removal, skin work, body reshaping, swapping a head between two frames, building a composite. This is where an unbounded promise eats the margin of a whole job. Ten minutes of colour work is a favour. Ninety minutes of clean-up on a background is a service you sell, and it is priced by the frame or by the hour.

Say it as a service, not as a refusal. Something like: Removing the exit sign is retouching rather than editing, so it is billed per image. It is 45 $ a frame and I can have it back to you Thursday. Want me to do the two you flagged? The client hears an option with a price. You hear a boundary that did not require an argument.

Write your rate down once and use the same number every time. A rate you improvise per client is a rate you will undercut when you feel guilty.

Four things have to be in writing before you shoot: what editing is included, how many rounds of revision the client gets, what counts as one round, and what happens after the last round. Adapt this:

Included editing covers exposure, colour, contrast and cropping to my style, plus removal of obvious sensor dust. Every delivery includes one revision round: you send one consolidated list within 14 days of delivery and I return the amended files within 5 business days. Corrections to work that does not meet the delivered standard are always free and are not counted as a round. Skin work, body shaping, object removal and composites are retouching, billed at 45 $ per image. Further rounds after the included one are billed at 90 $ per hour.

Change the numbers to yours. Keep the shape. The paragraph does its job at the moment a client asks for a third pass, and it does it without you having to invent a policy on the spot while annoyed.

Fifteen messages over three weeks is not fifteen small favours. It is fifteen context switches: reopening the catalog, finding the frame, remembering the grade, exporting, re-delivering. That is why a job with two hours of actual revision work can feel like it lasted a month.

So ask for the list as a list, and give the reason out loud. Clients cooperate with a reason far more readily than with a rule. Put it in the delivery email:

Take a few days with the gallery, then send me everything in one message. I work through revisions in a single sitting, so one list comes back much faster than requests arriving one at a time.

Set the window with it. Fourteen days to send the list is generous and still finite. An open-ended revision window is how a delivered job stays half-open into the next season.

Some of these look a bit off is not a revision request. It is a feeling. If you act on it you will guess, guess wrong, and burn a round. Send it back for specifics, politely and with a format:

Happy to look at those. Can you send me the file name of each one and a line on what feels off, for example too warm, too dark, or crop too tight? With that I can fix exactly what you are seeing rather than guessing at it.

Two requirements: a named file and a stated change. That format is also what makes the work fast at your end, because a list of file names maps straight onto frames in your catalog. When the client comments on the photo itself inside the gallery, the file name comes attached for free.

Never send amended files as email attachments. The moment a corrected frame exists in someone's inbox, there are two versions of that photograph in the world, and the client will circulate the wrong one. The printer gets the old crop. The wedding party gets the un-corrected colour. Nobody knows which is current.

Put the new file in the gallery the client already has, and let the link stay the same. On clientgallery.io the gallery lives on your own subdomain with no platform branding, hosted galleries never expire, and the client downloads the whole gallery in one click or any single image. Revising a delivered gallery costs nothing extra because there are no per-gallery fees and no storage tiers to climb.

One more thing the gallery does that email cannot: it keeps the record. When the revision list lives as comments on the photographs, there is no argument later about what was asked for or when.

Most revision pain is not the editing. It is the reconciliation: matching an email full of half-remembered descriptions to the actual frames, then hoping you found the right ones. The fix is to work from the client's own marks instead of from a parallel list.

The two-way Lightroom Classic plugin does that. You publish proofs to the gallery straight from the catalog, and the client's picks come back into the catalog. The revision round then happens against the same selection the client has in front of them, not against a list retyped from an email. When the amended frames are ready, they go back to the same gallery.

If you work in another raw processor, the principle holds: get the client's selection into your editing environment as data, not as prose.

The third round on a preference request is not an editing problem. It is a pricing conversation. Two passes at a grade means taste is in play and no further free pass will land it, because there is no defect to fix. Say that plainly and offer the paid path.

We have taken two passes at the colour and I think we are into personal taste now rather than a fix. I am glad to keep working on it at my hourly rate, or we can call the set final as delivered. Which would you prefer?

Both answers are acceptable outcomes. What is not acceptable is a fourth free pass that you resent, delivered late, on a job that stopped being profitable two rounds ago.

Not every revision list is a client overreaching. Three failures on our side of the table produce most of the long ones.

• The shoot did not match what was sold. If the portfolio is bright and airy and the delivery is moody, the client is not being difficult when they ask for a warmer grade. They are asking for what they booked.
• The gallery went out without a consistency pass. If frame 12 and frame 13 come from the same setup and do not match, the client will find it, and they will start looking for other faults. Check your sets before delivery, not after.
• Nobody said what was included. A client with no stated boundary will keep asking, because from where they sit nothing tells them the asking should ever stop.

When one of these is the cause, fix the work quietly and without invoking your revision policy. The policy exists to protect a fair process, not to defend a delivery that was not ready.

• clientgallery.io plan, gallery lifetime and full-resolution handoff terms. https://clientgallery.io/ Fetched 9 September 2026.
• clientgallery.io fair-use ceilings (1,000 photos per gallery, 250 GB of proofs per paid account, 5 GB on free accounts) and the two-way Lightroom Classic plugin, confirmed in the product on 9 September 2026. https://clientgallery.io/

No competitor prices, caps or policies are cited on this page, so none are listed here. The contract wording, the rates and the turnaround windows in this guide are worked examples to adapt, not industry figures. Where a number belongs to your studio, use your own.