How do I stop spending so much time post processing?

Learn about Pareto Principle, and embrace it. As a former perfectionist, it is one of the best things I learned both in personal and professional life.

From Internet .....
The principle states that 20% of the invested input is responsible for 80% of the results obtained.

AltgnJoey wrote in post #18144526
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.

Why are you taking these pictures in the first place? The answer to this question might help you to understand why you dread the editing process. There is no harm in deleting all the picture taken or even not to take a camera along in the first place. You don't owe anybody your time and effort - except if it makes you happy or if you want to be generous.

Your family and friends are not your clients. YOU choose the present you want to make. This might be a bottle of wine or ONE printed photo or ..... No need to edit 140 pictures just to get one you want to have printed.

Buy a film camera, you can't take lots of shots, the ones youn take have to count, and no editing to do

welshwizard1971 wrote in post #18146090
Buy a film camera, you can't take lots of shots, the ones youn take have to count, and no editing to do

Darkroom requires time and editing.

I sometimes struggle with the same thing... and I solved the problem by taking only the best few images and working on them. The rest just get basic exposure corrections.

If only there was some way of getting somebody else to process a film, some sort of printers perhaps, ah well...............

welshwizard1971 wrote in post #18146173
If only there was some way of getting somebody else to process a film, some sort of printers perhaps, ah well...............

The only one that know what the final print should look like is the one that took the picture so why would you want to give that decision to someone else?

welshwizard1971 wrote in post #18146173
If only there was some way of getting somebody else to process a film, some sort of printers perhaps, ah well...............

Back in the darkroom days we would do all kinds of things with developing including basic exposure shifts to push or pull processing, etc, There's also dodging and burning. You can also effect changes in contrast and even manipulate grain. Then there's still cross-processing as well as other alternative processing methods not offered by big labs. I wouldn't send my film to be processed by someone who cares nothing for my process any more than I would give my RAW files to someone else to edit.

Give 5 really amazing photographers a negative and have them print it and you are very likely to get 5 very different interpretations of that negative.

airfrogusmc wrote in post #18146122
Darkroom requires time and editing.

No, you're right, he should hand process 300+ prints in a darkroom, that's save him some time over digital processing

Q: How to spend less time post processing?
A: Get professional counseling about your OCD

welshwizard1971 wrote in post #18146242
No, you're right, he should hand process 300+ prints in a darkroom, that's save him some time over digital processing

I didn't say that. I was responding by saying that with film you should also process your own so it also has a time element required and that capturing the image is only the first part of the process.

AltgnJoey wrote in post #18144526
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.

Heya,

I know the feeling. I'm sure many of us do. And not just for terrestrial photography, this also applies to astrophotography where you may have videos and hundreds of minutes of data to combine and edit, and it must be edited, no way to get it right in a single long 15 minute shot for example. Editing is a reality. But you can do things to minimize the editing experience.

Take less photos, or increase your cull rate. I try to take less photos and simply make every attempt at a photograph meaningful. I used to chimp away but I really didn't like having to sort through 200~400 photos later only to find out a handful were the ones I wanted to keep, use, show, share, etc. One thing I had to really learn was that not every photo needs to be made into a keeper. I'm ok with keeping the RAWs for another day, but I will go through and pick the absolute best images from each session and try and limit it (if two photos are too alike, I will pick one from them and cull the rest). I try to limit it. I try to think of "if I'm printing these..." there will not be enough space on the walls, so I have to pick the ones that really mean something, versus are just pretty pictures but really are not "photographs" (each person's standard varying of course). Even when I do birding, I take less photos. I try to capture a specific wing position or interesting moment, some action, and I cull anything that isn't that (even if it's a perfectly good photograph, but simply, standard looking). For portrait, which I do a ton of, I have to really cull down and I focus on the emotion, micro-expressions, and light to determine if the photograph is being kept or not. I try to cull things down so I don't have 20+ images at the end to share, but rather, maybe 8, 12 or so. I try not to do more than that unless it was required. Again, if I were to print (and I print a lot of large ones), would it really be on the wall? If not, I sort of move on. I determine if the photograph is a "share" photograph for fun, or if it's a print worthy photograph and I put more into it.

For editing, standard stuff, I develop actions to speed up my process and I name them to suit. It really speeds things up. I will have an action that does the noise reduction, contrast, saturation & vividness and high pass so that I can load a photo and hit it with that first, then simply crop it and look for any last details to fine touch, speeds things up considerably.

I also focus more and more on trying to get as much right in the camera so I have less to fix later in post when possible. So I try to get exposure correct, when using lighting, I try to get it correct, I try to look for interesting light, and I try to think of it as a color image or black and white image first, so that I expose for that in mind.

For my fastest process, I set up a small studio for product shoots (wife's crafts; equipment, etc) where I have a small space with a small low power wired strobe with a modifier on a boom, all setup and ready to go, with an old camera set to take the smallest JPG possible, with the white balance custom set to match the strobe's temperature, preset for exposure with that strobe in it's position so that I or my wife can literally pick it up, point it at an object, expose, and just transfer the tiny JPGs off the card and just add a watermark if necessary and post--no editing done beyond cropping/rotating which takes a second.

Granted, I don't do that for photographs that I want to be more meaningful, those I shoot RAW. But when I know I don't need to do a lot of editing to get the results needed, I will switch to JPG to help reduce time spent editing, and also shoot smaller JPG sizes so I can even take that step out of editing too.

Very best,

airfrogusmc wrote in post #18146249
I didn't say that. I was responding by saying that with film you should also process your own so it also has a time element required and that capturing the image is only the first part of the process.

It's a photography forum, did that really need saying? And my suggesting it to same time and avoid OCD, obviously implied domestic large scale printing, Walmart etc, professionally printing 300+ shots via a fine art printer would be ruinously expensive, so I can't believe anyone considered that option, but then I never considered anyone thinking processing 300+ shots in a home dark room would be a time saver either...............

nqjudo wrote in post #18146184
Back in the darkroom days we would do all kinds of things ...

"We" being an infinitesimal percentage of the whole that shot with film.

Two of you are clearly thus missing the point/suggestion being made WelshWizard.

How anyone can interpret the idea of reducing post processing time by suggesting finding space in the home/office to out fit an entire dark room, and spending days instead playing with chemicals?

The original suggestion has merit, and it is again what the vast majority of film shooters did for decades.