How much time do you spend in post ?

[degies]

I just want a general indication of how much time you spend in Post? I normally shoot outdoors and it varies from sports and events to wildlife and landscapes. It is my hobby and I do tend to take it too serious some days getting way too technical, but at the end of the day it is a release from my day job. I do not shoot commercially or weddings for people. Now I watch and read  a lot of training tutorials on gear, technique and interesting bits and lately I have been getting to grips with lightroom4 and that brings me to my question. I never spend more than five minutes on a image. I like to say what you see is what I shot. I might make the sky a bit more  blue and I might play around with HDR a bit, but at most I will use PhotoShop or something to remove an item from an image that is normally not there in the first place, e.g. that piece of litter that otherwise should not be there, but I missed when I composed the shot. In Lightroom I basically fix my exposure, Crop it, insert the lens corrections, meta data and if I really have noting to do I try and figure out what the other buttons do. The map section is quite handy now.
When I look at some people's photo's I always wonder how much time they spend in Post on an image? To me unless you do it Commercially I would like a little tag on the picture that could indicate the picture was a trashcan, but after 40 hours in post it is now a rose!

I would just like to get some other views especially of people who are just shooting as a hobby. How much time do you spend in Post ? 

[Forceflow]

This is hard to say. Some images I pretty much post as they are (with the usual refinement one needs to do when shooting RAW of course) and spend maybe 5-10 minutes on them:

Some are heavily modified, went over again and again taking up several hours of work:


In general I would say that most of the photographs that I release on my profile have been worked at for around 5-10 minutes, it's rare that I go much longer than that. If I do a bilk shot during a show or event I might even just fire up dpp and have it create the images automatically from my RAWs. (I'll still do a little of post, but that is mostly just cropping and nothing else)

I do photography only as a hobby and as such it often also depends on what kind of mood I am in. sometimes I just want to publish the shot and sometimes I just want to play around with it in PS to see what else I could do with it...

[Kernuak]

When it comes to wildlife, I rarely spend more than 5-10 minutes in post (mostly in Lightroom), in fact, it often takes me longer to keyword. I tend to spend a bit more time on landscapes, but not a huge amount, unless there are some images I am looking to create a certain look in, then I might spend half an hour or so or on rare occasions (especially B&W), perhaps a couple of hours.

[RLPhoto]

Depends, Could be a few seconds to a couple of hours.

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I just took 1500 images of our school play, about 1000 with my 1D MK IV, and 500 with my D800. I try to average 1 minute each.  I first weed out all oof and obviously poor images, I use lightroom to adjust batches of similar images with the same settings, and every trick possible that I know to cut the tie down,  My new D800 is going to be a problem, its takes 5 to 10 seconds for the image to render, and up to 30 seconds for NR to finish.  I've done all but about 400 of the D800 images, and will spend another 8-16 hours on them.

[bp]

I just took 1500 images of our school play, about 1000 with my 1D MK IV, and 500 with my D800. I try to average 1 minute each.  I first weed out all oof and obviously poor images, I use lightroom to adjust batches of similar images with the same settings, and every trick possible that I know to cut the tie down,  My new D800 is going to be a problem, its takes 5 to 10 seconds for the image to render, and up to 30 seconds for NR to finish.  I've done all but about 400 of the D800 images, and will spend another 8-16 hours on them.

Whoa - 5-10 seconds would drive me insane.  I also shoot a lot of live theatre, and tend (also) to walk away with between 1200 to 1500 shots from a production photo session.  Usually carry 2 bodies on a BR double strap.  Then process and whittle down to around 50 or so final keepers.  I find myself just at the edge of my patience waiting the 2'ish seconds it takes for 5D2/5D3 shots to render.  Being able to spot and reject the "bad ones" even before rendering is a valuable skill.  heh

This has become worse though, with the 5D3.  Not because of render times, but because it just doesn't miss focus as much as the 5D2, so instead of instantly deleting blurry shots by the dozen, I'm constantly flipping between perfectly focused shots trying to decide which is the best one from that series.   Need to retrain my brain to trust the AF more, and snap fewer.

[prestonpalmer]

None. My editor does that.

[dirtcastle]

I think 5-10 minutes is a good target amount of time. For 95% of my shots, I can get it close in 5-10 minutes. But approximately 5% of my shots take anywhere from 15min to hours.

I could spend days editing a single shot. And I have. But there is often a diminishing return. And it's good to be aware of the diminishing return.

[Taemobig]

It depends, if its an event/wedding, I use lightroom and I take about 1-5 minutes for a photo then I just sync the settings to every photo in the same lighting condition. Then I look over each photo and make minute adjustments if needed.

For modeling shoots, especially published beauty shots for print, that's when I use CS5 and take my time. I can spend at least 1 hour to 6 hours on one shot. This is when you should get experienced make-up artists/hair stylists. 1-2 hours spent getting hair and make-up perfect means less work in post.

[skinkfoot]

For me it is a matter of printing or not printing.  I seem to spend a lot more time if I am going to print.  I do a lot of lens changes in not ideal conditions.  For those images I have to delete dust due to small apertures.
Other than that though 2 minutes or less in post,  Shoot it right the first time.

[D_Rochat]

Other than that though 2 minutes or less in post,  Shoot it right the first time.

Yeah, and Ansel Adams should have gotten it right in camera......

[RichATL]

I do fashion and beauty work, and work as a freelance retoucher.

I try and keep paid tests under 5 minutes...
and magazine editorials get more time but I don't like to spend more than an hour unless it's to do something creative in post.  Most of the time it's 15-20 minutes a shot.

For clients, I'll spend as much time as they need... but it's usually broken down in to small chunks of time, for client approval.  I've billed 9 hours before, (probably more like 6 hours actual "wrench time", spread across 9 "rounds"), that usually happens when there are multiple camps that have "approval" powers.

Nothing on my website had more than an hour of retouching, and most were in the 10-15 minute range
www.richmeade.com

[westr70]

I typically spend 5 minutes give or take on keepers and sometimes longer for really good content that could have been shot better.   

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I just took 1500 images of our school play, about 1000 with my 1D MK IV, and 500 with my D800. I try to average 1 minute each.  I first weed out all oof and obviously poor images, I use lightroom to adjust batches of similar images with the same settings, and every trick possible that I know to cut the tie down,  My new D800 is going to be a problem, its takes 5 to 10 seconds for the image to render, and up to 30 seconds for NR to finish.  I've done all but about 400 of the D800 images, and will spend another 8-16 hours on them.

Whoa - 5-10 seconds would drive me insane.  I also shoot a lot of live theatre, and tend (also) to walk away with between 1200 to 1500 shots from a production photo session.  Usually carry 2 bodies on a BR double strap.  Then process and whittle down to around 50 or so final keepers.  I find myself just at the edge of my patience waiting the 2'ish seconds it takes for 5D2/5D3 shots to render.  Being able to spot and reject the "bad ones" even before rendering is a valuable skill.  heh

This has become worse though, with the 5D3.  Not because of render times, but because it just doesn't miss focus as much as the 5D2, so instead of instantly deleting blurry shots by the dozen, I'm constantly flipping between perfectly focused shots trying to decide which is the best one from that series.   Need to retrain my brain to trust the AF more, and snap fewer.

My 1D MK IV, 5D MK II, 7D, and 5D MK III process instantly compared to the D800.  Those huge files take a lot of time, even with a fairly fast computer.  Its not the hard drive, my SSD is fast, its the processing time.  My I7 is 2.5 years old, so there are much faster new models, but even twice as fast would not be fast enough for me.  I'll be looking at computer speeds.  My Windows computer rating is 7.5, held down by the video card.