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.