Editing, processing and retouching

I sometimes wonder if using film would be easier. After all, I wouldn't be processing colour film myself I would have it all done at a lab. Processing digital images takes time - firstly there's the RAW conversion, whether this is done in ACR, Capture One or Lightroom there's still work to be done. Although once initial corrections have been made the remaining images can be batch processed this is still time consuming.

Once the images has been processed and outputted as Tiffs, work then commences in Photoshop to make more adjustments and carry out retouching work. The amount of time this takes depends on what the shoot it, beauty headshots tend to take the longest as you're looking to make a flawless image and this involves a lot of skin work and make up retouching.

All this needs to be factored in when you're planning a shoot as the post production will take up a lot of resource following a shoot. I find that this is often a drawback to putting a larger shoot together on a mutual benefit basis as quite often models, stylists and MUAs will each choose different images and if they each choose ten from a shoot that will be thirty images to process and retouch.