What’s your rush? Personally, I find my editing process is improved by what I term slow editing. I let images age for a while before making final decisions.
What’s the rush?
I see a lot of photographers who seem to be tied to daily production quotas. After being out shooting all day, at night they feel compelled to edit the day’s shoot and post some to social media.
I don’t. If that is your need, I can sort of understand, but I don’t agree with you. It is a much better use of my time to go out and have a relaxing dinner with my wife. Later that evening I may sample a few images – in camera only – just to make sure I am getting reasonable results and there are no technical problems. After all, it is too late to do anything about the day’s shoot at that point.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
As a matter of fact, I no longer even backup my memory cards while I’m traveling. I seldom bring a computer anymore, so I don’t and can’t do any processing. This is part of my new found minimalist attitude for photography. More on that later. It’s not the subject today.
My point is that I am not pressured to rush updates out to anyone on any schedule except my own.
Aging helps
More and more, I find that aging helps the quality of my curation process. That is, if I edit immediately I don’t make the best decisions. Now I usually deliberately build a lot of delay into my process. This is what I mean by slow editing.
Why would I slow it down intentionally? I find that time helps me distance myself from the emotions of the moment when I took the image. These emotions can often promote a picture to prominence it does not deserve because of what I felt. Time helps the emotions to subside. I can look at the images with cool objectivity. Well, I can do better. Can we ever truly be objective about out own work?
There is a double standard that we have to apply to our work. I believe that emotion is a key part of making a great image. If we did not feel something special, how can we bring an excellent image to our viewer?
But during editing, emotion is a hindrance. We have to be brutally objective. We may have loved the moment and captured something that is extremely important to us. But if it is not as sharp as necessary and well composed and well lit, and if it did not capture a moment that shows other people what we felt, it is no good except for our private collection.
Time helps me get that distance I need to realistically cull out images I love. It’s still painful, but a lot easier.
Editing takes time
I find editing to be a very time intensive process. Maybe I do not have a good process. Or maybe I am just inefficient. Or maybe this is just what I have to do. But that is where I am.
I have seem people who are able to burn through a large shoot in minutes. Never spending more than about a second on any one before flagging it as thumbs up or thumbs down. That usually does not work for me.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Here is an example of my high level editing workflow: First, let it sit for a while. One to 2 weeks is usually a minimum. Longer if possible. Then make a pass through marking obvious rejects and doing some quick editing on some of the ones kept to make sure they have a good chance to turn out well. I seldom spend more than 2 minutes editing an image at this point and I do it in Lightroom Classic.
At this point I have probably eliminated 1/2 of the original images. My next pass is “housekeeping”. I make sure the keepers are tagged with location metadata and some preliminary keywords.
Slowing down even more
The next pass, when I get around to it, is a “grading” scan. At this point I allow myself to assign 1 to 3 stars to each. My informal scale means 1 is worth saving, 2 if better than average, and 3 is a possible winner – but it still needs more work.
In another pass I concentrate a lot on the 1’s. These are sort of on the edge. I ask myself if any should be promoted to 2 or should they be eliminated. Quite a few may change. It is always my goal to try to eliminate when I can. I used to keep almost everything thinking I might need them someday. I don’t.
Now I go back and look just at the 2 or higher rated images. What other editing needs to be done? This can get very time consuming, with edits in Lightroom and/or Photoshop taking hours in some cases. Ones I feel very good about at this point might get promoted to 4 stars. A very few rare ones maybe to 5. I do more keywording on the best ones.
By this point I have rigorously shredded and thrashed the image set. I am now ready to file the survivors into permanent storage locations and gather some into collections. At this point a lot of the survivors are tagged for copyrighting. Fewer are “promoted” into my quality hierarchy.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
A recent example
As I write this I am about a month past an excellent trip to the south of France. Awesome; do it if you get the chance.
Over the trip I shot about 4000 images. I loaded them in my computer immediately on getting home, but waited 2 weeks before even looking at them seriously. After another 2 weeks I am about half way through the first pass, eliminating a lot and doing some preliminary edits on the ones not immediately rejected. I figure it will be at least another month before I have my final picks. Even then all the editing will not be compete.
Yes, I am very inefficient. It takes me forever to get through a large edit like this. But when I get done I can be pretty confident that the higher rated ones are decent to show people without embarrassment. I know that the only low ranked ones I need keep are for some textures and backgrounds. I never go back through the low ranked ones to select images for a show or project. That doesn’t stop me from keeping a few of them “just in case”. Emotional attachment leaks in. But they are filed separately.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
My experience
I am being candid about the workflow I have evolved to. This is slow editing in the extreme. All I can say is that it works for me. This is true of any workflow, no matter how famous (or unknown) the instructor is who is recommending it. Your workflow is highly idiosyncratic. Experiment to try alternatives, then do what works for you no matter what anyone else says
As I am going through these images from France I find that I am disappointed with a lot of them. Just tourist shots. Of course, I was a tourist. But some, a few, capture my feeling and interpretation of a place or event. Those are a joy to find.
I have to let the emotion of the experience drain off in order to make good judgments about my images. This takes time. Luckily for me, I do not have to be on anyone else’s schedule. I’ll get there when I get there.
Today’s images
All the images in this article were shot in France on previous trips. After all, I haven’t finished this year’s edits yet.
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