If you’re a photographer then you probably know this feeling: you LOVE shooting but you can’t stand editing! It takes up so much of your time and by far outweighs the time you get to spend actually doing what you love, shooting. What can you do though? It’s all a part of the process, right?!
That’s what we thought too. When we first started shooting we would spend hours upon hours meticulously editing every image. It was daunting & exhausting and it quickly caused us to feel burned out. So, we started looking for ways to cut down our editing time. We get asked all the time what tools we use to edit, what presets we use, etc. and today we’re answering those for you. Here are 3 tools we have used to cut our time by more than 50%!!!
Editing in Lightroom
Like we mentioned before we used to edit all our imagines in Photoshop. One by one. It took forever even loading them into the program. Now we use Lightroom which is designed for quick editing a lot of images. You can even sync settings across multiple images for shoots that have pretty consistent lighting and color. It also has a host of helpful tools to make more detailed edits from controlling individual colors to removing spots and blemishes from images.
Presets
We have our own presets we have made to use within Lightroom. Some photographers prefer to purchase them from other photographers while others make their own. If you’re unfamiliar, these presets simply apply a base edit to your images to help you get your images how you like them. They aren’t designed to replace editing altogether but rather to reduce the time you spend editing. Ours is comprised of edits we do to a majority of our images every single time. We have 2 of them for different lighting situations.
As a heads up, they do take time to create on your own but it’s so worth it in the long run! Plus, you house them within Lightroom and can apply them with one simple click. If you’re super consistent you can even have Lightroom add the preset to your images upon upload.
Photomechanic
We had heard of Photomechanic and how amazing it was for culling for an embarrassing amount of time before we bought in… Please learn from our mistake and at least download the trial. This has saved us countless hours of culling in Lightroom! It allows you to quickly tag images, move them, and even rotate images. It’s seriously a huge game changer!
We hope that each of these editing tools helps you grow your business and cut your editing time significantly! They have worked so well for us, and for so many photographers. If you liked it and are looking for more photography business tips, check out our blog series for photographers here.
Blessings,
Katie & Alec
