How long do you take to process a shot?

tonkie

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As title!
Just wondering how long do you take to process your shots and what do you use to do it.
Personally I must take about a minute and most of that is on my wonky horizons (thank you Jim) and I use the softwear that came with my camera.
So what is it for you?
 
Wonky horizons, cropping and sometimes exposure (shoot in RAW) that's it for 95% of my shots (if required)
 
Depends. Most shots probably 30-60s but if I've done a set with similar exposures etc I can just paste the settings saving a lot of time. As I shoot raw most will need contrast and a touch of saturation. I do often tweak highlights, shadows etc, and some sharpening. I tend not to apply any luminance NR these days unless they're particularly noisy.

On shots I'm particularly happy with and what to make look that bit more special I can spend up to 30mins on it I guess. Thank god I'm not that happy with most ;)
 
I use Lightroom almost exclusively these days for processing and for any shots that I decide to work on I'd say processing takes 2-3 minutes on average once they are imported.

Jim
 
Last photo I have finished, yesterday, was easy and I don't think it took more than 2-3 hours in Photoshop and maybe 10-15 min in Lightroom before that.

Shot before that, I don't know how to check, but I'd say more than 10 hours of actual work in Photoshop and maybe 10-15 min in LR. Mind you it was a PITA as there was tons of microscopic dust and scratches I had to remove. I think out of all that time the cloning and healing process took probably 2/3rd of the whole editing time.
 
I use Lightroom almost exclusively these days for processing and for any shots that I decide to work on I'd say processing takes 2-3 minutes on average once they are imported.

Jim

Same here, use Lightroom and a few minutes per shot depending upon what needs doing. I do synch several similar shots together to save time and have a full workflow that I go through on each.
If I edit any in Silver, Colour or Analog Efex then that can take quite a bit longer but I only do that with specific photos that I think will benefit from it.

I actually find the PP one of the greatest and most fun bits of photography as I've always been quite creative and can put my own stamp on my photos :)
 
I have my standard processing saved as LR presets so I can apply with one click.
Then I may tune the levels with the sliders.
I also like to correct verticals and such, but that is pretty quick in LR too.
I more than often crop too.

Alternatively, 0 sec. Just sent a few hundred product shots off to misterclipping for background removal instead of us doing it... ;) I had taken all the photos for one of my son's clients who needed a new product gallery for a web site. Used a green screen, but we also needed a mannequin removed. Pretty good service.
 
literally hours for me... especially when I add up all the minutes spent going back and re-processing the same photo... again, and again, and again!
It's all part of the fun for me.

I had recently change my default import settings for LR, made it to be one of the Fuji film types so that it wasn't the God-awful 'Adobe Standard' rendering on import. But I recently realised, that with setting all the defaults so that freshly imported pics are almost done already, takes the fun out of everything!
The biggest enjoyment I get out of the whole photography thing, is the 'before and after' views of the whole pp process.
I'm always doing this with the missus "hey, check this pic out.....Before....("nice pic" she's thinking) ....and AFTER!!". "Wow, Steve... how did you do that?! your camera is amazing...YOU are amazing" ...
I may have exaggerated a lot of that, but that's how I feel like it goes :)

Anyway, my point is, I'm gonna restore the default import settings, so my pics look flat, dull, unsharp on import, and then I can work my magic, and enjoy the before/after to the max!

Where's the fun in getting a great photo in 1 second?!...I'll tell you where...Nowhere!! ;)
 
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Anyway, my point is, I'm gonna restore the default import settings, so my pics look flat, dull, unsharp on import, and then I can work my magic, and enjoy the before/after to the max!

Where's the fun in getting a great photo in 1 second?!...I'll tell you where...Nowhere!! ;)

Lol - know exactly where you're coming from. That's why I don't have any import presets in LR. I love going through my flat dull photos, rating them then doing each one individually and seeing the massive difference with the before & after :)

Even better when you create several virtual copies of the same photo and then PP them in slightly different ways. I hate to say it but I think it's more fun than actually taking the photo... :eek:
 
yeah - but dosn't it get a bit hot inside that Anorak ? ;)
 
Depending on the complexing, 20mins to 2hours.
Even longer if required.
If it's less than 45mins, I class that as a quick edit.

...and it shows.... ;)
 
I don't believe in processing images, everything must be perfected at the moment of the shot - or it's not photography.

If your end product is not a true representation of what you see before you, then you are not a digital artist you are a con artist.



:p
 
...and you've just confirmed something for me Dan - well maybe a couple of things... ;)
 
...and you've just confirmed something for me Dan - well maybe a couple of things... ;)

go on then :)

I've got 3500 images from the wedding to process, and it's going to take a few nights :(
 
1) You do actually have a sense of Humour :devil:

2) ...and it's actually quite funny (sometimes) :p
 
Depends on the image, usually it takes about 10 minutes to do inital processing in Lightroom then another 5-10 minutes in Photoshop (noise reduction, sharpening, adding logo) unless I'm doing something like cross processing where I'll do two groups of adjustments then use Nik Silver Efex, which I then drop into one of the groups to restore colour i.e.
Magdalen College | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

If I'm printing a file then it takes a little while longer as I tend to take my time on the image before I send it to Canon's print software, then have to wait for the printer to warm up. Still on the same set of inks that I got with the printer (20+ A4 prints now).
 
ahhh, 'Kevin' is you! :)
saw that pic (at the college) on Flickr yesterday, great pic!
 
Depends on the photo and what needs doing. Can take me anything up to 30 minutes on one photo. But I fins most of that time is spent in the dark room processing my film first...... ;)
 
I did a calendar shoot recently. Took 817 pictures, using lightroom first pass took me about half an hour to reject obviously terrible ones, read missed focus and bad composition.

Next pass was to use colours to group into themes, in this case the key shots for each month they wanted (although I ran out of colours!) That took 15 mins or so

Then I spent a few minutes or so on the first photo in each set, and using batch processing applied the same setting to all others in that set. Only couple of mins to do that.

Then quick pass to give a star rating. Rejected all 3 and below. This was about half an hour to rate.

5 stars mostly didn't need much fine tuning, 4s needed a little more. This took about an hour.

Left with 97 keepers that I was really happy with.

Exported to 300dpi high quality jpegs (not long, didnt hang about to see) and uploaded to flickr (ages!!)

Customer is reviewing them as I type.

To much info, maybe?
 
Nice explanation of your workflow. Interesting you rate the photos after working on them. With me that's the first thing I do before even touching them.
 
thats a good point, but I kinda consider my first pass of rejections as a rating in itself, im only really using the actual star ratings later on as a second pass once ive got some basic processing done.. Ie I kinda think it'll look ok, then realise it's actually shite :)
 
I don't use stars, I flag mine (white flag for the ones I will be processing later in PS).

I decided it is too much faff to be deciding between 2 and 3 or 3 and 4 starts when I am only interested in clear winners. However, in my case it is usually only a handful of images.

Sometimes 3 or 4 hour shoot ends up with a single winner and that's all I need. Sometimes I have few images to work with but usually not more than 10 per set.
 

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