How Long Does It Take for a Photographer to Edit Photos?
Recently I answered a question on Quora titled “How long does it usually take a photographer to edit photos?” and the response to MY response was a bit overwhelming. After about a week the response went viral with nearly 100,000 views. It was published on many user’s “Quora Digest” and the response to it was extremely positive. This took me by surprise because my answer was relatively straightforward. This is what I said:
“The short answer to this: it depends. On average, I return photos to clients within three days, and for personal projects, it can take up to a month. I'm a headshot photographer in Los Angeles, so I spend a TON of time retouching. I'd say the most significant issue when it comes to photo editing time is retouching.
For instance, if the subject in the picture has great skin, all I need to do is cull and color the photo. This takes about 5 minutes per photo. However, if they have poor skin, this can EASILY balloon up to 30 minutes per photo. If I'm editing a beauty image or a close-up headshot, it can take up to two hours for a proper edit. It's a very tedious process.
With this specific image, I spent about 45 minutes retouching, coloring, and adjusting the photo. The model already had damn near perfect skin and we had a makeup artist. I still feel like there can be more retouching done to this photo but I’d rather keep it more natural. If her skin WASN’T perfect the editing time would easily exceed an hour. With a quality edit, you need to make sure that the texture of the skin is perfect as well.
This second image is an example of a photo that took about 5 minutes to edit. Again, she had perfect skin, and it's more of a full-body shot, so detail in the face really doesn’t need to be altered.
Different photographers have vastly different methods of editing so expect some shots to take a while. In general, the editing methods that provide the best results will take the longest amount of time, so expect that too.
Hope this helps!
Edit: a few people wanted to see the unedited version of the shot. Here it is, I used local dodge and burn to even out the dark spots under the eyes and on the forehead + fixed up some blemishes in the texture. I contoured slightly with dodge and burn too”
This isn’t something that I’ve talked about much on my website, but editing IS a super tedious process and it’s extremely difficult to put an estimation on how long it will take to edit photos. Here’s an example of some more in depth editing.
The first picture is the edited photo; the second picture is straight from the camera. This edit took about an hour. The majority of the work done to it was on the skin's texture and evening out inconsistencies of the luminosity of the skin. I found the image a little flat out of the camera, so I did some significant dodging and burning because I felt like I could get it to pop with some effort. I'm still not happy with this image, the hair covering the lips was distracting, the eye color needs to be adjusted, and I think I need to smooth the skin a bit more. My first attempt to smooth the skin wasn't much of a success as it became too smooth.
Obviously, all photographers have a different work flow, my work flow varies massively depending on the project. In general, the more close up the image is, the more that it needs to be retouched.