alt Hacker NewsI quit editing photos
Comments
I got tired of in depth fiddly editing and wrote Filmulator to minimize the decision-making and streamline editing. I rarely spend more than 20-30 seconds per image.
You get a clean, basic look, no weird colors or overly creative "looks", but with adjustability and great highlight handling that JPEG doesn't get you.
The current builds there are quite old but we've got new ones coming.
Whatever floats the boat.
Even back to film/analog era, taking a photo is just the 1st step. Then apply some darkroom work (dodge/burn/use some filters to adjust the highlight/shadow etc etc). Image editing softwares like Photoshop simplify the process.
I mostly shoot in black & white (both film and digital). Since once of my biggest inspirations is Ansel Adams, then no I don't adhere to "SOOC" (straight out of camera) philosophy. Fine tuning in Photoshop is a must.
A few lessons hidden in here:
Perfect is the enemy of good: Don't obsessively edit. Cull obviously bad photos. Find a few pretty good ones. Pick one at random. Edit lightly.
Photography can focus on captures or edits: analog photography necessitates a focus on the capture. Be in that moment, frame the shot you want, and your only edit might be some color correction.
While the above might not make you a 99th percentile photographer, that probably isn't a goal you need concern yourself with. I always find photos online that blow me away. Artists with the patience to plan and wait for the perfect shot, possibly for hours. Artists that meticulously cull until they find an exceptional photo. Artists that spend a half hour editing a single photo adjusting sliders.
If that's not you, you still don't have to give up editing photos if you like the result better than the camera's JPG. You just have to focus on the parts you enjoy, and find balance in the quality of the end results.
(And personally I love DxO PhotoLab. Purchased once on sale, no subscription. Fun to use, and I love the results!)
Here is my take, as a person who attended multiple photo editing courses from professional award-winning photographers:
* Shooting intentionally for further processing is not the same as shooting for the best out-of-camera look.
* One needs to critique a photo before editing it. This YouTube video comes with a good-enough checklist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0tQB6BVpc4
* ART (https://artraweditor.github.io/) at this point, if the AI masking and denoising one-time setup has been done (see https://artraweditor.github.io/AItools), is so good that many Lightroom courses apply almost 1:1 to it.
My process is to take a lot of photos, then ruthlessly cull them before I do any editing.
I usually keep around 10% of the total photos for editing. After that, I do another round of culling and keep only the best.
I also follow a philosophy of "good enough". If left to my own devices, I would probably endlessly edit photos.
I edit a single photo for around 3 minutes. That way, I will not feel stuck.
I've come to the same realization after shooting digital, film, and back to digital again.
I've found that if I apply "recipes" or "presets" to my camera and shoot jpg I get roughly what I want straight out of camera. In fact, I find that shooting jpg exclusively with a preset _almost_ scratches that film itch: there is a kind of permanency to the rendered output, and that forces me to slow down and think about what I want to render with this subject like one does with film.
Once I'm done shooting I simply import to Apple photos and make very light edits from there if any before sharing.
It's liberating to embrace constraints and reduce tooling. You might even have fun.
The question I why did you edit photos? What was goal? Why were you doing it in the first place?
I guess the thing you have discovered shooting analog is that each click is a finite resource so you spend more time composing and being aware of the scene before you take the photo.
Saving £20 is nice.
Having your 36 snapshots developed at a decent lab will cost you more.
In you are paying them additionally for edits as well you are on longer saving money. You just pay someone else.
Or are you giving it to a company that runs it through an automated usually digital these days sometimes analog machine that develops them automatically? Those machines usually do edits as well. But highly automated ones. (I am not sure they make them anymore)
Having my medium format film developed is far from cheap.
Lightroom is far from the only editor out there and it is not a great editor to start with. Lightroom is a Frankenstein combination of of a DAM and an editor.
You probably will want some form of DAM to organize your photos regardless.
The problem isn't that keepers necessarily need editing, the problem is that it is tempting (to some) to spend more time than they need simply because they can. Or because they feel they should. (Don't watch people ruining photos and making up for their lack of talent on youtube)
I shoot with post-processing in mind because I have years of experience with the cameras I use, so I know how they work. I rarely do that much more than just "normalizing" the pictures to what I wanted to capture (fix one, apply to whole batch) and apply some look that I've saved as a preset. Perhaps 1-5 seconds of tweaks per photo. If you need more, you probably didn't get the shot in the first place and you'll do better next time.
For me the time spent "editing" photos is marginal compared to the time I spend looking at the photos to decide which ones are keepers.
I can't understand what the youtubers who edit photos are doing. Most of them take mediocre to bad shots and then somehow manage to make them worse. And then people believe that this is what they're supposed to be doing
Then again, most photo-influencers don't actually understand even something as basic as focal length (no, a 105mm is a 105mm regardless of whether you put it in front of a tiny sensor or a big honking medium format)
I went through a similar transition. Used to spend hours in dark table each shoot, but for a hobby it got tedious. Eventually I got my in-camera configuration right enough and haven't touched a raw in months. I'll still sort and crop; but no need to fiddle with things the camera is good enough at already.
Do whatever you want that makes you happy.
I take thousands of photos a year with my phone and less than 1% of them get edited.
I take thousands of photos with my Nikon in RAW / NEF format. I have over 50 large photos printed in my house and editing absolutely helps when you print 20x30" or higher.
I'm mostly the same now, but leaning more towards a hybrid flow.
My Fuji is set to JPEG + RAW. I will apply the sim most suited to the occasion, and only edit the RAWs when I've got a shot that I think is worthy of editing - i.e. something that will end up as a wallpaper/printed out/a feature shot.
I got tired of editing photos, and I ended up editing them sometimes years after the photos were shot.
As for my phone, I just use an app called Analogue on my iPhone for everyday shots (the built in LUTs are beautiful), and then for shots I think may warrant some editing later, I'll use the new Moment cam app.
I went one step farther and quit taking photos. And this is after many years of hobbiest photography in the film era, had a darkroom at home, SLR with several lenses. Early digital cameras were underwhelming, basically the equivalent of a 110 film snapshot camera. By the time they got good I had started to reflect on the fact that I almost never went back and looked at any of the photos I'd taken, so I just stopped. Now although with my mobile phone I have a quite decent camera in my pocket all the time, I rarely use it. The "ohh I should take a picture of this" impulse just never enters my mind anymore. I enjoy the moment, and have the memories.
I set my camera to save both JPEG and RAW. 95% of the time the camera's JPEG is fine so I just use that (maybe with some final adjustments in GIMP), but it's nice to have the RAW around in case more significant edits are needed.
My version of this workflow is, i take digital photos, and don't edit them.
Turns out, it's fine! The photos aren't perfect, but no amount of editing could make them perfect anyway. They look like the thing they're a picture of. That does the job. And with the time i save by not doing any editing, i have time to take more photos! Or read a book! Or sleep!
I admire what this person is doing, but some reasons I prefer raw + lightroom over eg camera jpeg are:
* Lightroom’s noise reduction is WAY better than what my camera (a D500) can do. I shoot sports, usually indoors, with highish iso, so NR’s gonna have to happen at some point.
* If I’m going to lug around a dedicated camera, I’m gonna have it do its best. I have my iPhone for everything else.
* I can apply today’s lightroom NR to raws I shot years ago. Similarly, I expect to be able to apply future lightroom’s NR to today’s raws.
* Lightroom Classic is a superb program - it has many warts and clunks and oddities but it achieved product market fit and it stayed there, doing what its users want. Adobe keep making small improvements, and yet they don’t fuck it up!! This is vanishingly rare in big tech!!! (Promos gonna promo!) I grudgingly pay for this.
(My theory as to how they have managed to resist the institutional imperative to destroy Lightroom classic is that they created a fork, named just “Lightroom”, on which the promo can wreak its destruction, it’s kind of a second golgafrinchan ark, leaving Lightroom classic alone. I pay for Lightroom classic as a way of saying: keep leaving it alone!)
Never been a fan of editing photos, especially as I have difficulties dealing with the infinite possibilities. I just stick with default output from the camera and just fix backlight or some minor adjustments required. I'm a big fan of Foveon sensor (sigma dp, sigma sd) and lately fp and BF, it helped a lot as they really know color and I love how they deal with it. I also shot and process black and white film, and appreciate the "deal with film/developper characteristics" approach too.
I started photography last year, i shoot raw because i dont like sony colors. But I have very quick process: "auto", little fidgeting with sliders, one in 10 photos gets a mask for sky and then i apply some preset that i like most for the photo. I just cant spend 30minutes on one photo.
But the editing process is very subjective. even in era of film there was a lot of processing, colors with chemicals, fixing defects. Just manual photoshop.
I understand the simplicity and joy of purists, but to each his own i guess.
I wrote a lil memento to my Fuji x pro awhile back along similar lines as this. Minimal post-processing and much more convenient than the film I was shooting, especially after moving to a town that didn’t have a local lab.
The dark truth no one wants to say out loud is that 'real' cameras are dying to cell phones not just because phones are more convenient to carry, but because phones take 'better' photos for 99% of people than they can manage with any other camera - and that's without any editing. It's all software.
Yes, enthusiasts here are spending hours editing RAW files and most think cell phone pics are over-HDRed messes. But phone software is so advanced now that it takes real talent and skill to replicate the perceived quality of what users get with their cell phone's software automatically. Most people are at a disadvantage with a DLSR/mirror less, not an advantage. That leads to ever-declining sales.
Why can't someone make a traditional camera with modern software instead of something that looks like it is out of 1994? The software on a Sony DLSR, for example, looks like the on-screen menu of a VHS player, but is somehow slower and dumber to use. The number of overlapping, incompatible picture adjustments on a Fuji is just as ridiculous.
I mostly try Apple Photos’ “magic” editing. It’s hit and miss, but when it hits, the photo gets way better. When not, I adjust a couple sliders (contrast, brightness, saturation). In both cases, only when I’ll use the photo. Otherwise, editing tools will be there for when (and if) I need them.
Original author here! Thank you speckx for sharing.
I’m not a professional photographer, I just wanted to write about where I’m at with a hobby I’ve had for ~15 years.
I love using a camera, I don’t love editing at a computer. So now I’m choosing digital cameras that have decent editing options in-camera. It’s comparable to choosing the roll in your film camera.
If there are any questions, I may get around to answering them. (No promises.)
Me too, I figured I spent more time on the computer than taking pics. Now I shoot jpg and if I have some spare time I go out and shoot. If I take a good pic I share it with basic editing if any instead of waiting to get it "perfect".
I'll be sticking with Lightroom 6 (non-subscription) and the old cameras it supports, until the sad but inevitable day I can no longer run it.
I don't find editing takes much time, because I now have so many custom presets I can apply on import or in bulk that do 90% of the work.
What does take ages is picking out the best shots, but really the only way to make that quicker is to take fewer photos. Which I suppose shooting film actually does force you to do. (But so would a 2GB SD card.)
This FLOSS RAW editor works really well, btw: http://www.rawtherapee.com/
Film is cool up until you waste 60$ on film and development to get blank rolls.
I have a very cheap mirrorless camera that I've taken around the world.
I accidentally dropped it, it bounced and was fine.
As for editing, I generally use mobile Lightroom to tweak lighting and that's it.
Their is a camera conundrum. What good is a camera so expensive you're afraid to use it ?
I just use Pixelmator Pro for a quick workflow. There's a nice feedback loop between taking the shot and editing it later.
I also went this route once I concluded that I enjoy the process of taking photos (getting the 'composition right') rather than editing. I've never heard of Camp Snap until now, looks interesting!
I just use Rawtherapee. No need to pay Adobe and no need to ditch editing completely.
I’m almost done moving from Lightroom to Darktable. Lightroom is amazing but I don’t edit enough these days to justify $20/mo.
If the straw that broke the camel's back is the nagging Adobe subscription, why not just learn Darktable or Raw Therappee?
I believe if you put photos out on the WEB, at the very least use exiv2 to add a some kind of copyright and strip out telemetry if any exists. Who knows any company pays attention to this, but at least I know it is "protected" :)
This is the file I used for exiv2:
#
# To apply to a Pic do:
# $ exiv2 -m copyright.txt <file>
#
# This should blank personal id info
#
set Exif.Image.Model " "
set Exif.Image.Make " "
add Exif.Image.Copyright Ascii "Copyright (c) 2026 MYNAME MYEMAIL"
set Exif.Photo.UserComment "Can be shared using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"The development I'm most excited about these days is AI restoration; I can denoise and upscale my pictures to my satisfaction. The next developments I'd like to see are refocusing (with depth maps) and retiming (with video) in post.
[dead]
I don't want to dunk on people who are discovering the charms of retro tech, but as someone who started with film and spent a fair amount of time in the darkroom, I was delighted to discover the hassle-free simplicity and dependability of digital photography, so it is a bit mind-boggling that people want to go back to the old way of doing things for their everyday snaps.
It reminds me of people buying vinyl, using VHS filters on social media, etc. I think it's more about signaling some cultural identity than any objective benefits of the "retro" process. It's not like digital cameras make you give up creative control. If you want to limit yourself to 36 unreviewed shots, you can do that with digital too.
That said, I agree with one thing: you shouldn't be paying for an Adobe subscription. Use Darktable, Capture One, or some other equivalent that you're not just renting for life.