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How much time do you spend on processing?
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Apr 11, 2014 08:39:23   #
henk33 Loc: Netherlands
 
I agree with cbercy, PP for a picture I like very much can take days or weeks. After processing the whole picture and parts of it, I make a print and look at it for several time. Then I decide f.i. that the sharpening was to much. No problem: each step I put in a separate layer and can increase or decrease later on.

Later when I decide to use it for an exposition or a competition I have to compare it with the other pictures I use for that event. Are color, contrast and brightness not to different. Again some changes.

So for my dear shots, time is not important.

At the other hand, I often photograph sport events. Can be hundreds of pictures. PP goes via Lightroom and asks mainly 0 -10 seconds for only brightness, contrast or simple cropping.

Henk

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Apr 11, 2014 08:45:46   #
johnst1001a Loc: West Chester, Ohio
 
Often no time, I shoot jpeg and raw at the same time. More often than not, the jpeg is fine, the RAW will need tweaked as it is shot more or less as a neutral photo, no applied camera presets like sharpness, saturation etc.. But if I want to tweak, can take seconds to many minutes to adjust RAW.

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Apr 11, 2014 08:49:04   #
TheDman Loc: USA
 
I spend my time in the field getting it as close to perfect in camera as i can. if i do get it close to perfect, i then spend 2-4 hours processing it in Photoshop. If i don't, i don't even bother trying to pp it.

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Apr 11, 2014 09:28:00   #
Mark7829 Loc: Calfornia
 
If you want to spend less time in post processing and get the best results, get it right in the camera. The biggest issue I see for landscape photographers is exposure. It’s not just a matter of camera settings but understanding light and composition. The biggest pitfall in landscape is images with high dynamic range (really bright whites/highlights and dark/shadows in the same frame). Learn to recognize these situations and adjust. Adjustments include filters such as ND’s and shooting in HDR or just avoid these shots all together.
Composition is all about subject matter, what is it you want the viewer to see. What should be in focus and sharp and what should not, what should be in the picture and what should not. This will reduce the need to crop.
There is work flow to consider. Adobe’s ACR has a top panel of tools and a basic panel, and they are set up to be used left to right.
1. Crop (do this first – always)
2. Correct WB
3. Correct any highlights or shadows especially spikes on the histogram
4. Use the tonal curve to make sure your range covers the full spectrum (Blacks are really black and whites are really bright).
5. Move to sharpening (making sure you are ay 100% zoom otherwise you can’t see the sharpening effects. Add luminous to reduce noise.
6. Move to Camera correction, lens correction and chromatic aberration.
7. Vignetting (use the color priority- do it last)
If you do the same steps often enough, create a preset button to do this all at once. If necessary, you can go back after the preset and weak it further. There are other sliders in the ACR panel that come into play for special situations including the adjustment brush, creating black and white images, etc. that I did not mention.
The most important thing in post processing is knowing what your image needs and moving directly to those tools to make the adjustment. You should be able to visualize the final outcome before you start. Know the tools and what they do. Many will move every slider and some sliders will counter act one another other if not used properly.
As I said above, to get it right in the camera is knowing what your camera can do, its functions and features and selecting the appropriate lenses and filters to get the best results.
Finally, not every image is worthy of post processing. Learning to give up and give up early will reduce your time. With presets and a single click you could be done with an image in seconds and sync or batch process a hundred or more with one click.
Are you done. No, you can make further enhancements with third party plugin like Nik, onOne, Topaz. But I only do that of the image passes the other basic corrections and enhancements I applied.

California Oak
California Oak...
(Download)

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Apr 11, 2014 09:32:21   #
marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL
 
wingnut1956 wrote:
Just a curiosity question..I'm wondering how much time is generally spent editing an average raw photo. I'm pretty new to messing with "raw" photos and have found it can take a LOT of time with all the things you can play around with. I subscribed to Adobe and have access to both lightroom and photoshop..so far have been playing mostly with lightroom, mostly because I found some great tutorials online. Still, I find myself spending more time than I seem to have available and have a real hard time deciding what's "right" and knowing when to stop
Just a curiosity question..I'm wondering how much ... (show quote)


I suppose the time spent is determined by what you're going to do with the photos. If you do a large quantity of shots per day as an occupation you want to do your processing at a rapid rate using all the speed tools available like macros, key combinations instead of mouse, Photoshop actions, presets, etc. to be proficient or else it would take you a whole week to process one day's worth of shooting. But if you're doing it for personal or commercial artistic purposes, you may spend a whole evening processing two or three shots to get precisely what you want and even then come back to them to verify they're right and tweak them some more. If you're doing composites and adding graphics and/or text, that could turn into a whole day or more on one photo.

Personally, I take from 40 to 80 [7-exposure] HDR bracketed sets (280 to 560 RAW frames) plus 20 to 25 single-frame stills per day. To make a long workflow story shorter (but not short enough for many on here), I run the bracketed sets through bulk processing in Photomatix and that takes quite a while (upwards of two hours of sitting around while it works). I can't manually process the final HDR/Fusion files until it's done.

I end up working on 16-bit TIFF Photomatix files that I put through LR5 (but now Photoshop ACR) for tone mapping - which is essentially the same processing you do to singular RAW files.

I'll spend from 4 to 8 hours processing them in LR and a layer-based program. I was using LR with PaintShop Pro X6 but recently shifted to Photoshop CC and I may not be using LR5 anymore because it's redundant.

So not including the unattended Photomatrix two hour processing time, that breaks down to an average of about 6 minutes on each photo although that's only possible because I long ago set up an LR preset (and recently one for Photoshop's ACR as well) that I apply to all files I want to process first before I do anything else. That removes almost all of the repetitive steps that I'd have to do 40 to 80 times so only minor tweaking is required. I can't even imagine how much time I'd spend per photo if I had to do everything myself with no presets to help. I probably couldn't handle the load 4 to 7 days a week and would go postal.

For any other singular RAW files, I'd guesstimate spending at least 15 minutes each before converting to TIFF, touching things up in a layer-based program, then converting to JPG for printing or web. On really important ones I'll come back for a second round after my eyes have rested overnight and I can see how out of whack my vision had gotten the day before.

IMO, I don't believe there's a specific amount of processing time that you can state as proper. I'm sure there are people who will claim to be in and out of RAW processing in two or three minutes while others will say hours.

By the way, in the help menu of Photoshop CC you can go to Adobe and watch a ton of instructional videos that are quite good to get started with. I'm fortunate to have a decade of Paintshop Pro knowledge behind me that can be shifted over to Photoshop easily so I've been working in it by the seat of my pants yet I still watched 20+ video clips at Adobe the first night I had it.

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Apr 11, 2014 09:38:24   #
Papa Joe Loc: Midwest U.S.
 
wingnut1956 wrote:
Just a curiosity question..I'm wondering how much time is generally spent editing an average raw photo. I'm pretty new to messing with "raw" photos and have found it can take a LOT of time with all the things you can play around with. I subscribed to Adobe and have access to both lightroom and photoshop..so far have been playing mostly with lightroom, mostly because I found some great tutorials online. Still, I find myself spending more time than I seem to have available and have a real hard time deciding what's "right" and knowing when to stop
Just a curiosity question..I'm wondering how much ... (show quote)


Hello Windnut. I guess I would have to say it all depends on the picture and its intended purpose. Sometimes maybe from 2-3 minutes, all the way up to a half-hour, trying different looks. Just depends.

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Apr 11, 2014 09:40:43   #
les_stockton Loc: Eastern Oklahoma
 
It sounds like from all the replies, that it varies depending upon what is photographed, and what the style is of the shooter.
I think the common point is that if you can, get it as good as you can in camera.

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Apr 11, 2014 09:40:51   #
russelray Loc: La Mesa CA
 
wingnut1956 wrote:
Just a curiosity question..I'm wondering how much time is generally spent editing an average raw photo. I'm pretty new to messing with "raw" photos and have found it can take a LOT of time with all the things you can play around with. I subscribed to Adobe and have access to both lightroom and photoshop..so far have been playing mostly with lightroom, mostly because I found some great tutorials online. Still, I find myself spending more time than I seem to have available and have a real hard time deciding what's "right" and knowing when to stop
Just a curiosity question..I'm wondering how much ... (show quote)

For 95% of the pictures taken, there is no "right." I make a living from my Photographic Art, so I do whatever I want to create whatever I want. If people like it and buy it, great. If they don't, that's okay, too, as long as enough people do like it and buy it!

I do keep track of the artistic effects that sell best, and each month I analyze sales to see what's trending. Flowers are always popular; the one below is my all-time best seller.



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Apr 11, 2014 09:43:17   #
russelray Loc: La Mesa CA
 
les_stockton wrote:
It sounds like from all the replies, that it varies depending upon what is photographed, and what the style is of the shooter.
I think the common point is that if you can, get it as good as you can in camera.

I do just the opposite because I don't like what the camera software engineers and programmers think I should like. Thus I have all my camera controls set to flat, flat, flat. That allows me the greatest flexibility when I take my photographs to Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Photo-Paint, Photomatix, Perfect Effects, Fractalius, and others to create my Photographic Art.

So maybe I do "get it as good as [I] can in camera"! It's just that we all have different definitions of what that means.

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Apr 11, 2014 09:59:46   #
les_stockton Loc: Eastern Oklahoma
 
[quote=russelray]I do just the opposite because I don't like what the camera software engineers and programmers think I should like. Thus I have all my camera controls set to flat, flat, flat. That allows me the greatest flexibility when I take my photographs to Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Photo-Paint, Photomatix, Perfect Effects, Fractalius, and others to create my Photographic Art.

So maybe I do "get it as good as [I] can in camera"! It's just that we all have different definitions of what that means.[/quote]

But if you are shooting RAW, it's flat anyway.

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Apr 11, 2014 10:15:20   #
russelray Loc: La Mesa CA
 
les_stockton wrote:
But if you are shooting RAW, it's flat anyway.

Actually, no, it isn't. That was my initial impression, but after installing Adobe's DNG converter and seeing the difference between DNG files and CR2 files as they come into ACR for processing, I started wondering.

So I went to my Canon 550D and started playing with the setting under Menu &#9658; Picture Style. I can adjust the sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone for picture styles Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful, and Monochrome.

I was shocked at the difference in the RAW files. I shoot RAW only, so even if I'm getting a jpg thumbnail in the camera in order to visualize the image, when I take the RAW file to ACR, that's not the case.

Remember that there is no set standard for RAW files, which is why Adobe created the DNG standard and why all of your different camera manufacturers have their own proprietary RAW files. Canon's most recent RAW standard is CR2 in their Rebel line.

Also, I convert all of my RAW CR2 files to DNG, for two reasons: (1) The DNG file is about 20% smaller than the CR2 file, (2) The DNG file is much flatter than the CR2 file, even after changing all the camera settings to flat, flat, flat.

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Apr 11, 2014 10:30:32   #
marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL
 
les_stockton wrote:
But if you are shooting RAW, it's flat anyway.


AH HA! Checkmate!

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Apr 11, 2014 10:32:00   #
les_stockton Loc: Eastern Oklahoma
 
marcomarks wrote:
AH HA! Checkmate!


well, maybe not, as he states. But I think some raw formats are flatter than others.

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Apr 11, 2014 10:34:50   #
marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL
 
russelray wrote:
Actually, no, it isn't. That was my initial impression, but after installing Adobe's DNG converter and seeing the difference between DNG files and CR2 files as they come into ACR for processing, I started wondering.

So I went to my Canon 550D and started playing with the setting under Menu &#9658; Picture Style. I can adjust the sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone for picture styles Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful, and Monochrome.

I was shocked at the difference in the RAW files. I shoot RAW only, so even if I'm getting a jpg thumbnail in the camera in order to visualize the image, when I take the RAW file to ACR, that's not the case.

Remember that there is no set standard for RAW files, while is why Adobe created the DNG standard and why all of your different camera manufacturers have their own proprietary RAW files. Canon's most recent RAW standard is CR2 in their Rebel line.

Also, I convert all of my RAW CR2 files to DNG, for two reasons: (1) The DNG file is about 20% smaller than the CR2 file, (2) The DNG file is much flatter than the CR2 file, even after changing all the camera settings to flat, flat, flat.
Actually, no, it isn't. That was my initial impres... (show quote)


I find this very hard to believe unless the CR2 file includes data to tell RAW post processing software to make changes to simulate in-camera JPG settings while still maintaining the RAW format.

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Apr 11, 2014 10:37:32   #
les_stockton Loc: Eastern Oklahoma
 
marcomarks wrote:
I find this very hard to believe unless the CR2 file includes data to tell RAW post processing software to make changes to simulate in-camera JPG settings while still maintaining the RAW format.


I was a skeptic too, since I've been shooting CR2 for several years now. HOwever, I'm not going to argue the point, other than to state that the raws I've shot were flatter than when I would shoot jpg of the same subjects or if I shot raw+jpg. Regardless, I thinkt he point is that we try to shoot as best we can in-camera, and then the post processing is less of an issue.

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