How do I stop spending so much time post processing?

I am literally walking right on by my laptop and telling myself daily, nope not today.

Everytime I shoot personal stuff, birthdays, family outings, holidays, I come home with some of my best stuff but I just sit there dreading the editing process. Now obviously if it's a job, I sit down and edit edit edit all day knowing that I have a responsibility and time frame to get the images to a client.

I honestly don't know what happened. I use to love coming home from personal outings and love seeing and working on my shots, weather one image took an hour or not. I was happy.

Now it's almost as if I can't do a standard exposure, contrast, saturation edit and slap it up on social media because I know if I take the photo through photoshop, and my other countless editing programs I can come away with a better image. Thing is I just want to get them up and move on to the next set of images and further my skill in the act of photography, but seeing 300+ picks waiting to be edited just kills my motivation.

Anyone else feel the same way? How can I just let go of the fact every image needs a 30 min make over in an editing program.

I am a perfectionist, I suffer from ocd, I also never want to misrepresent myself to the public that my pictures are subpar compared to jane doe who makes every shot she has look like a fantasy painting.

I can relate. This is what I've done:

• Take fewer photos. At events, I used to take so many photos and had so many to edit.
  
• Cull and recull. Nowadays, I spend the first few days culling images. This means I do a first round of culling. In Lightroom, I filter by flag and unflagged photos... then I start going through them one by one hitting the X button to reject. The rejected photos just disappear off the filmstrip. Then I stop and give it some time before I cull again with a more critical eye.
  
• Upgraded my computer. I just bought new laptop with a bit more RAM. I had maxed out the old one at 8GB and I have 16GB now. I still need a new scratch disk, though.
  
• Automate upon import. I let Lightroom Auto WB, Auto Tone and Auto Exposure upon import. It is okay to start with about 75% of the time. I also rules set up for automated noise reduction - different strengths depending on how high the ISO is.
  

If you are getting paid, well, that's your motivations right there. If not, just select few shots...shots that matter to you. That's it. No need to go through all the shots if you aren't getting paid. I do that too...getting my cycling race shots up on my FB page and people would begin tagging themselves and their friends. I don't sell all the photos. Out of 300 to 500 shots I took, I only processed and culled maybe 10% of them the most.

Yeah, people asking me if I have any more shots...I usually give them the run around about putting them up later..which I never do. I know they aren't buying them. There are people I know who would buy them because they are my fans. So, I make sure I have them up as soon as possible.

If you actually have OCD, then you need more than photography advice to help deal with it. But I'll take a shot at the photography part. Here are a few observations.

I have heard it said that if you need to spend more than 5 minutes post-processing a shot, just bin it. The exception is if you're working on a fine art piece and you're not trying to "fix it". Learn the discipline of deleting shots that are flawed in some way. Trying to fix them will often make them worse. Every photographer I know has a story about the one that got away. An opportunity presents itself. When you look at the shots, you blew it. It hurts. But you have to learn to let go.

Most people who look at our shots are not as critical as we are. The exception is other photographers. If you show a shot to a family member before and after you post-processed it -- assuming that you are a competent photographer -- they will ask you how they're different. That's because most people don't have a critical eye.

300+ shots sounds like you're doing a little praying and spraying. Newcomers make the mistake of thinking that quantity trumps quality. That's just not so. Learn to wait for the moment. In those situations where you must go into burst mode -- like in sports action -- reduce the number of shots that need post-processing to the very best of the bunch. Redundant shots wear down the viewer. Show them only the best of the best. I teamed up with another photographer a while back on a friend's wedding. I gave them 150 shots, which was about half of the number I took. The other photographer gave them 1600. You probably know where this is going. They were awed by my 150 shots (their words). They completely captured the day; every shot was perfect; and there was no redundancy. They're probably still wading through the other 1600.

Here's another example. I once had a conversation with a photographer at a Renaissance Faire. This was after he advised me that another part of the field was a better spot for photography, but the lighting was poorer. He told me that he had submitted 1400 shots to the previous year's photo contest. I had submitted 14. One of mine won first prize. A year later, they changed the rules to limit the number of submissions.

You are a perfectionist, have OCD and don't want others to ever see any of your images they may find inferior to those of another shooter. That does not seem to me a bad starting point for some great work.

You are also, I think, smart in refusing to spend 150 hours of labor on shots from a personal outing.

Perhaps you could set yourself a comfortable time limit to process as many or as few shots as you want to the standard you want and then forever delete the rest. As I enjoy telling an accomplished friend, "You keep proving that OC isn't always a D."

joedlh wrote in post #18144558
If you actually have OCD, then you need more than photography advice to help deal with it. But I'll take a shot at the photography part. Here are a few observations.

I have heard it said that if you need to spend more than 5 minutes post-processing a shot, just bin it. The exception is if you're working on a fine art piece and you're not trying to "fix it". Learn the discipline of deleting shots that are flawed in some way. Trying to fix them will often make them worse. Every photographer I know has a story about the one that got away. An opportunity presents itself. When you look at the shots, you blew it. It hurts. But you have to learn to let go.

Most people who look at our shots are not as critical as we are. The exception is other photographers. If you show a shot to a family member before and after you post-processed it -- assuming that you are a competent photographer -- they will ask you how they're different. That's because most people don't have a critical eye.

300+ shots sounds like you're doing a little praying and spraying. Newcomers make the mistake of thinking that quantity trumps quality. That's just not so. Learn to wait for the moment. In those situations where you must go into burst mode -- like in sports action -- reduce the number of shots that need post-processing to the very best of the bunch. Redundant shots wear down the viewer. Show them only the best of the best. I teamed up with another photographer a while back on a friend's wedding. I gave them 150 shots, which was about half of the number I took. The other photographer gave them 1600. You probably know where this is going. They were awed by my 150 shots (their words). They completely captured the day; every shot was perfect; and there was no redundancy. They're probably still wading through the other 1600.

Here's another example. I once had a conversation with a photographer at a Renaissance Faire. This was after he advised me that another part of the field was a better spot for photography, but the lighting was poorer. He told me that he had submitted 1400 shots to the previous year's photo contest. I had submitted 14. One of mine won first prize. A year later, they changed the rules to limit the number of submissions.

Yeah the ocd problem is something I've been facing for 10 years now. I've been on medication to try and stop my compulsions but in the end it's something I have to work on myself with true and honest exposure treatment - don't do them and sit through the irrational thoughts and understand nothing is going to happen, lol. Easier said then done.

Yeah my first wedding, I came home with 2,000 shots that I was able to bring down to 400, 400 was still a major pain in the A to edit.

As for family stuff, personal stuff, I feel like I'm documenting something my kids, and grandkids and family can look back on but at the same time I got into the habit years ago of thinking every shot I wanted to keep needed to go through the ringer of pp.

Lately I have been doing a lot of bw work, I've always preferred bw over color but in reality it's cause I can run a shot through silver efx in 3 min and be done. ugh.

Forgot to mention that learn how to batch process..... Starting from general editing that could be applied to a set of shots under the same lighting condition. Continue to work down until you get to your localized editing such as cloning, spot cleaning, and cropping.

AltgnJoey wrote in post #18144575
Yeah the ocd problem is something I've been facing for 10 years now. I've been on medication to try and stop my compulsions but in the end it's something I have to work on myself with true and honest exposure treatment - don't do them and sit through the irrational thoughts and understand nothing is going to happen, lol. Easier said then done.

Yeah my first wedding, I came home with 2,000 shots that I was able to bring down to 400, 400 was still a major pain in the A to edit.

As for family stuff, personal stuff, I feel like I'm documenting something my kids, and grandkids and family can look back on but at the same time I got into the habit years ago of thinking every shot I wanted to keep needed to go through the ringer of pp.

Lately I have been doing a lot of bw work, I've always preferred bw over color but in reality it's cause I can run a shot through silver efx in 3 min and be done. ugh.

Being a B&W photographer for my personal work I shoot with aLeica M Monochrom and use CS^. Never liked the canned look i was getting from SE and I have it. It came with the camera. if you want to take you B&W to the next level and your a true perfectionist stay away from SE. I do everything in Photoshop for the control and it's kind a like the way I would work in a traditional darkroom. I believe that post production and the capture should hold equal weight. Just like film, printing and the darkroom. Getting the right negative for the way you process is key to putting into print what you saw when you made the exposure. That is pretty much the way I approach digital.

airfrogusmc wrote in post #18144583
Being a B&W photographer for my personal work I shoot with aLeica M Monochrom and use CS^. Never liked the canned look i was getting from SE and I have it. It came with the camera. if you want to take you B&W to the next level and your a true perfectionist stay away from SE. I do everything in Photoshop for the control and it's kind a like the way I would work in a traditional darkroom. I believe that post production and the capture should hold equal weight. Just like film, printing and the darkroom. Getting the right negative for the way you process is key to putting into print what you saw when you made the exposure. That is pretty much the way I approach digital.

Really? I have used photoshop for a lot of its tone adjustments the past few years. Trying to achieve certain looks, things that maybe I saw others doing and wanted to do them as well.

In reality, I have always shot black and white well before I took up photography 7 years ago. I had spent my teenage years in Philadelphia filming a lot of semi and profession skateboarders well into my late 20's. Always in black and white. I just like the asthetic , it feels right to me. I never have tried processing my photos to black and white in photoshop. any good tutorials you could recommend, I would like to give it a try.

AltgnJoey wrote in post #18144526
Now it's almost as if I can't do a standard exposure, contrast, saturation edit and slap it up on social media because I know if I take the photo through photoshop, and my other countless editing programs I can come away with a better image.

Maybe social media don't deserve so much work as you're giving them. Is putting a lot of images there a good investment of your time?

TooManyShots wrote in post #18144581
Forgot to mention that learn how to batch process..... Starting from general editing that could be applied to a set of shots under the same lighting condition. Continue to work down until you get to your localized editing such as cloning, spot cleaning, and cropping.

This is a great point. Learn how to batch process, whether it's by syncing edits in Lightroom, or by using batch actions in Photoshop/Bridge.

I'm an enthusiastic proponent of Lightroom for "quickly" culling, processing, and publishing - especially when I have a large set of images that were shot under consistent lighting conditions (which is most of my work, actually).


The next step, which is much harder to do, is to understand when you've passed the point of diminishing returns. If you can spend an hour to make a set of 10 photos that are 95% good, but it'll take you one more hour each (10 hours) to make them 97% good, or three more hours each (thirty more hours) to make them 99% good - is it worth it? Probably not.

Your expected publishing destination and delivery method are also important to consider. For social media, there's rarely any reason to do a high-end edit and retouch. You don't need to spend six hours to do a magazine-cover-quality skin retouch, for a photo that'll never be seen bigger than the 720-pixel image on Facebook, or the 1.5-inch square on Instagram. Nobody cares about skin texture when the whole image is only an inch tall. Get the colors pretty close, but remember that Facebook compression is going to mangle them anyway.

... of course, I'm not much of one to talk. Last week I worked hard to get my editing queue down from 12,000 images to 10,500 images.

AltgnJoey wrote in post #18144589
Really? I have used photoshop for a lot of its tone adjustments the past few years. Trying to achieve certain looks, things that maybe I saw others doing and wanted to do them as well.

In reality, I have always shot black and white well before I took up photography 7 years ago. I had spent my teenage years in Philadelphia filming a lot of semi and profession skateboarders well into my late 20's. Always in black and white. I just like the asthetic , it feels right to me. I never have tried processing my photos to black and white in photoshop. any good tutorials you could recommend, I would like to give it a try.

Allen is well versed in the Zone System. You can begin there. Then, you know what a perfectly good BW photo should look like. Then, understand what certain BW filters do to your tones. And you try to duplicate the same look in photo shop. Using SilverEfx for BW conversion is no brainier even without knowing the Zone System. FYI, for digital BW shots, I use photoshop only. For BW film shots, I.....use BW films and developing them myself using the Zone System.

nathancarter wrote in post #18144598
This is a great point. Learn how to batch process, whether it's by syncing edits in Lightroom, or by using batch actions in Photoshop/Bridge.

I'm an enthusiastic proponent of Lightroom for "quickly" culling, processing, and publishing - especially when I have a large set of images that were shot under consistent lighting conditions (which is most of my work, actually).

The next step, which is much harder to do, is to understand when you've passed the point of diminishing returns. If you can spend an hour to make a set of 10 photos that are 95% good, but it'll take you one more hour each (10 hours) to make them 97% good, or three more hours each (thirty more hours) to make them 99% good - is it worth it? Probably not.

Your expected publishing destination and delivery method are also important to consider. For social media, there's rarely any reason to do a high-end edit and retouch. You don't need to spend six hours to do a magazine-cover-quality skin retouch, for a photo that'll never be seen bigger than the 720-pixel image on Facebook, or the 1.5-inch square on Instagram. Nobody cares about skin texture when the whole image is only an inch tall. Get the colors pretty close, but remember that Facebook compression is going to mangle them anyway.

... of course, I'm not much of one to talk. Last week I worked hard to get my editing queue down from 12,000 images to 10,500 images.

And of course upgrade your computer with a SSD drive and 16gb+ RAM. It will speed up your post processing time by 50%, depending on what you have now.

TooManyShots wrote in post #18144604
And of course upgrade your computer with a SSD drive and 16gb+ RAM. It will speed up your post processing time by 50%, depending on what you have now.

Most of the time, the bottleneck is me second-guessing myself.

But, more processing power would have helped a LOT on my last set. I had to merge several panoramas, and prep a file for printing 96x48". Lots of time spent just waiting for the thing to process.

OhLook wrote in post #18144592
Maybe social media don't deserve so much work as you're giving them. Is putting a lot of images there a good investment of your time?

Good question. I don't know the answer to at this point.

I've done weddings, corporate headshots, newborn sessions, family portraits, through the past few years of photography. I've always wanted to make a steady income off it and have done the marketing, the seo bull s, the outreach, and in the end I sat there saying this just isn't me. I hate weddings cause well, I kinda hate happy people? So I know I'm not cut out to be all happy and be this pleasurable experience for a couple on their wedding day, the pay is nice though.

Family, newborn, portrait stuff - ehh I enjoy it a tad, I mean kids are cool, and I have a good time. Once was enough for newborn work, couldn't wait to get out of that situation.

Headshots were ok, kinda f ing boring but again paid well.

Thing is the more I post to social media the more referrals I am getting. So it's a mix of, well I know these pictures are potential advertisements.

I kinda feel like I am emulating a lot of the more successful photographers in the Philadelphia region because I think that's what people want and in order for me to make some money I have to edit my shots like all these other people are doing.

I guess photography for me, became more of photography for them - the potential client - which killed all my interest about 2 years ago.

Now I'm back and I'm starting to feel this need to emulate a certain look by local big wigs, I am getting jaded again. In all honesty I know what I want to shoot, and I know I don't want my images to look like something out of the 60s,70s, or 80,s film era.

**** this turned into a rant. I just trashed 140 shots from my sisters birthday bash, stuff I was actually going to edit. Then looking at them I said I hate them, they are horrible pictures, boring, and mean nothing to me. gone. felt liberating.