You probably find that you spend more time editing your photographs than you do actually taking them, and this can be a big problem.

Professional photographers who are working on a high volume of shoots can find this to be a particular drain on their time – setting aside full days for editing means losing out on the potential to shoot more, and could also cut into your own home and relaxation time. Backlogs can grow quickly if anything gets in the way, leaving you weeks behind schedule in the blink of an eye.

So what do you do to solve this? You have to find a way to make your editing process faster. Professional retouchers can take on the work for you, although this will cut into your bottom line and could leave you feeling dissatisfied with the results.

Managing your workload better will help you to fit more in without spending money to do it. If you can do one shot fully edited in five minutes, you will be saving yourself a lot of time. When doing basic corrections it should take no more than a few seconds, so long as you have everything set up right – and so long as you are not doing high-end retouching work, you may be able to hone your skills to the point of editing each photograph in just one minute. Follow these skills to make a start.

1. Shoot Better

The less editing a photograph needs, the less time it will take to edit it. Makes sense, yes? If you are spending unnecessary time in post-production on things that you could have corrected in-camera, it’s time to learn to use that camera better. Learn about over- and under-exposure and how to correct for them. Watch out for the background of your frame, and anything on your model that may need removing in post, such as a loose label or a mark on their clothing.

Make sure you have your settings right so that each image will be sharply in focus, and try to frame each shot so that you don’t need to crop it later. Setting up your white balance correctly for the lighting situation will also help a lot.

All of this knowledge will help you to cut out a lot of work in Photoshop. If you are working with models, you might also want to think about a few other considerations. Having a professional make-up artist, for example, usually means that any blemishes or marks on the skin of the face will be covered, as opposed to having to edit them out of every shot.

Knowing your style is hugely important too. If you have to spend 10 minutes deciding what to do with an image, you’re already wasting time. Embrace your aesthetics: do you like to put everything into black and white? Do you always add a touch more contrast than necessary? Is there a certain technique you apply to every shot? Taking out the decisions will make your process flow more smoothly.

2. Set Up Photoshop

Your Photoshop workspace is hugely customizable, and that’s not an opportunity you should miss. Make sure that you have everything set up just for you and your editing style. There shouldn’t be anything on your main toolbars that you don’t use, and the tools you use often should be accessible via one click. Learning shortcuts helps hugely, so that you can make a lot of changes just by clicking keys on your keyboard.

Setting up Photoshop actions helps to you to automate the processes that you do regularly. If you shoot in a studio with the same lighting set-up most of the time, you can even create (or purchase) an action which gets the contrast and levels right in order to colour-correct every image with one click. Adding copyright metadata, merging layers, adding a logo, resizing for social media – all of these can be made into actions.

You should also organize your actions properly to make them easy to find. Have a “daily” folder for your everyday editing tasks, and different folders for different shoot situations or files. You can also download custom actions which allow to create certain effects very easily. This means you don’t have to even learn how to put them together – you can just buy them ready-made.

The basic point of actions is to reduce time. If you can think of something that takes you three clicks or more to do, put it into an action. You will shave seconds off every edit, but that seriously adds up over time.

3. Don’t Edit

If you are editing all of the photos you take in one shoot, stop. If you are editing even half of them, stop. You should only be editing your very best photographs, and only the ones you intend to use should be given the full treatment.

If you have agreed with your client to deliver them 25 images, you shouldn’t be editing even as much as 50. Selecting images is a really hard thing to do, but make a couple of sweeps through instead of just editing them all.

1. First take out anything that doesn’t look right at a glance.
2. Then go through with a zoomed-in look and take out anything that doesn’t have great focus.
3. Now go through again and take out any shots that are too similar, saving only the best one from the set.

That should narrow your selection down hugely, helping you to save time in Photoshop. Make sure that you’re also thinking about how much work goes into each one: when deciding between two headshots, eliminate the one where a stray hair landed on the forehead so you don’t have to waste time editing that hair out.

4. Batch

Batch processing is one of the most important tools in Photoshop, and now that you have your actions set up you can put it to good use. Let’s say you open up a set of 20 images that were taken in studio conditions. First run your contrast and levels action (set it up by editing the first one and recording the process if you don’t already have an action that works).

Then run a special effect to give them your signature look. Give them all a quick visual check, using CTRL + TAB (or equivalent Mac command) to scroll through one by one. Look good? Run your merge visible and add copyright action with a save command, and watch the finished versions pop into your folder. If you have it all set up right, those edits should have taken no more than 5 minutes to complete. That could mean you are able to edit a set of 100 photos in less than half an hour!

Conclusion

I hope you found those Photoshop editing tips and tricks useful! Make sure to share your own via Twitter or Facebook :)