How much do you need to edit?

Nowadays I keep seeing a lot of photos from people across the country. Some of them tagged me in Facebook for honest critiques. Some of them are awesome piece of work, but some of them still need a lot of work.

What strike me was the amount of editing some photographers did to their pictures to make it “work”. Now for the record, I’m not against any sort of editing but I do believe that there’s a certain limitation that should be placed in those editing.

We are photographers, not digital artists. That’s what I always believed. I mean, if you spend 3 hours editing a picture that took you 1/500th of a second to capture, then something is really, really wrong with your shots and the way you take pictures.

I do agree the need to present a “beautiful” and “awe-inspiring” shots, thus I plan my shots and check if I got everything I need (composition, angle, lighting, mood) before I proceed to call it a wrap.

Truth is, I never spend more than 5 minutes on each picture. In Lightroom, I’ve downloaded a lot of presets and I have a few of my favorites for me to use with my shots. I almost never crop my shots. Weird but yes, I just don’t. Some people call me purist, but I always imagined that I’m shooting on film and frankly speaking, it’s really hard to do post processing on film negatives.

My workflow usually is like this :

• Clear up RAW files in the memory card to my HDD
• Create another back up just in case something bad happens
• View the RAWs in Digital Photo Professional software
• Adjust color saturation, brightness, white balance accordingly
• Compress the pictures to JPEG format
• View all in Picasa to see the compressed version
• Select the shots that came up according to my shotlist
• Load them in Lightroom
• Using presets, I will make a final output based on the shotlist
• Save and load to Facebook album, Flickr and backup folder.

That’s it. I don’t even open up Photoshop most of the time.

Yes, some of you might look at me and say I’m a lazy person. But I am confident with my work and I really plan my shots or think properly before I take a shot to save me time editing and thus freeing myself with more time to work.

Photoshop to me is to remove blemishes, facial scars and tone down some freckles on my model’s face.

I think I should stop ranting. I’ll leave u guys with a quote from a master photographer.

“Back when I started, you had to KNOW photography before you could ever call yourself a photographer, and before anyone took you seriously as one. Today the photo schools are turning out nothing more than “digital technicians”.” – David Leslie Anthony