One of the things I’ve found with digital photography is that I can spend a lot of time post processing my images if I’m not careful. Retouching is a bit like writing software for a living – no matter what one does there will always be something else that can be done to improve it. I used to believe that this was because it was easy to make a change but having read Pressfield’s book entitled “The War of Art” I’m wondering if sometimes this is also an excuse to never finish an image. Read the book and you’ll understand why I made that statement.
Getting back on topic, I find that sitting at my PC and retouching an image can be quite fun so I’m not complaining but when faced with a deadline and the necessity of getting a body of work out the door to please a client and the fun element can very soon evaporate. This is further exacerbated if there is a large number of images to sort through
So, what canbe done to speed up the workflow?
The obvious answer is to improve post processing skills. After all, doesn’t it follow that if one is better and more skilled at using PhotoShop that processing an image will take less time? Maybe, maybe not. I’ve found that as I’ve become more au fait with PhotoShop and LightRoom that there is always more and more I could do to an image to “improve” it. And all this takes time.
Another option is to improve one’s use of the editing tools. LightRoom presets and PhotoShop actions can provide a huge speed increase. Particularly for regular or repetitive tasks. e.g. there are presets that I always apply when uploading RAW files from the media card into a LightRoom project such as setting up the metadata and applying presharpening. Similarly I have a series of actions in PhotoShop attached to hotkeys that I routinely use during my editing. They may only reduce the time to perform a task from, say, 30s down to 5s but such a saving when made for multiple tasks and over multiple files can have a big effect.
Probably the biggest thing that anyone can do though is to get as much right in the camera as possible at the time of capture. Attention to detail, whether it be in the foreground or the background can save a huge amount of time. For example, take this image from a previous post…
The first version of this shot had a green flower pot in the background which was extremely distracting to the eye. Even on the small lcd on the back og the camera. Taking 10s to walk over to it and move it out of shot actually saved several minutes of work in post. In my experience whenever I hear myself saying/thinking “I’ll fix it in post” I’ve generally found it to be very labour intensive. Getting it right in camera, whenever possible can help to save a lot of time later. Not having to do a 10 minute edit for the sake of 10 seconds to fix it on set is a great saving. If you have 6 images that all need the same work done you’ve saved yourself nearly an hour.
As a real world example, consider this. Last Sunday I did a beauty/jewellery shoot that lasted 3.5 hours. That evening I uploaded the images, all 437 of them, onto my PC and backup drive. On the Monday I made my selection and reduced this figure down to 62. On the Tuesday I went through and post processed the images, weeding out a further four to leave 58. The edit these images took 4.5 hours which works out at less than 5 minutes per image.
The big take-away from this post is “do it right, do it quick”
