All good points Richard. We won multiple design awards over the years using touched up pre-production parts (send them out for painting and texturing and cleanup usually only costs a couple hundred bucks) and photography that usually only ran between $1500-5k for a 1-2 day shoot (depending on locations, models, etc, but stuff on white with a good lighting setup was never too prohibitive.)
If you’ve got an ultra high end brand image to maintain - I can certainly justify the dude who probably spent a week modeling those stitches, hand tweaking UV maps and getting just the right level of “puff” out of a foam earpiece.
But since we have no idea if the OP is making spinner toys or Bugatti’s hard to gauge the appropriate level of entry. But usually hiring a freelancer means you’re towards the low end since you don’t want a full agency cost overhead.