Editing for dough, or show?

I’ve been pondering editing lately – I’m behind in my editing, there’s a queue of people who are good natured enough not to harass me about it (although if they were paying clients I suspect it would be different!), and I find myself wondering why I can’t seem to get through the backlog! While people have heard me use (Vincent Laforet’s?) “Photoshop is not a verb” quote on many occasions, it turns out it is even in Adobe’s Trademark guidelines document – “The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a common verb or as a noun…”. Well, there you go then, all you photoshoppers!!

I’ve told many people that I’m an “in camera” shooter – I’ll spend more time on the lighting and setup in order to get it as close to perfect as possible in the camera, and that way I reduce my overhead in post. For shooters who like Photoshop, or are creatively inclined in that direction, the opportunity to be less diligent on the set is possibly absorbed by much more time in front of the screen.

Cases in point – I have at least 3 photographer friends who think nothing of spending 6+ hours editing a single photo. When I’ve asked them why they do it, I got three different answers:

• The client is paying for the time
• The image has to be perfect (in the photographers eyes)
• I enjoy editing, I don’t notice the time

Out of those three responses, only the first one pays the bills. The second one is useful if you are entering a competition or there are other specific drivers. The last one will never be uttered by professional photographers! So what are you editing for, the show or the dough?

I personally have told people that if an edit takes me longer than 10 minutes, I’ve screwed up the image and won’t use it (and I’ve rejected plenty of images in my time, purely because they weren’t good enough technically IMHO). But I came to realise only recently that the decision to edit is actually either a business decision, or an artistic decision – but rarely both! My edits will draw criticism, no doubt – they could be better, no doubt. But they usually take less than 10 minutes, so I’m usually comfortable that my critics are in the (non-paying) minority viewing my images!

I view editing with a business eye – time is valuable, image modification is time consuming, and the audience for the image is largely unqualified to critique my work. As an example, I used to update one of the art community sites, waiting by the screen for comments to come in from people who I thought would validate my work. Eliminating the “she’s hot” and other inappropriate or irrelevant comments, I quickly discovered that the people who took the time to actually analyse my work were at least attempting to be objective and constructive (even when I suspected they may not have sufficient experience or technical knowledge to truly critique).

Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this – what I learnt was that, for any 1000 views/visits an image received, I’d get:

• 900 views with no comment left;
• 90 views with a useless comment left (the 14yo geek male “she’s hot” crowd); and
• 10 views with comments of some interest

Turns out it is the 10 people that are interesting (or 1% of my viewing public!). Of the 10, there’d be a mix of professional and advanced amateur shooters. And universally I would find that the comments would either come down to positive (but well thought through) commentary on the images (such as light, compo, technical, etc). Or I would get one or two technical critiques (often lighting related), or editing critiques (usually relating to skin or colour correction).

What has this got to do with anything? Well, it’s actually simple – if I can edit for 10 minutes and only derive 2-3 critiques/negative feedback with 5 or 6 positive comments from 100 viewers/commenters and 1000 viewers overall, I think that’s a good use of my time. What I really wonder is if I could significantly increase the number of viewers and positive comments by taking an artistic view to editing, and spending hours making an image perfect?

Hang on, is there such a thing as a perfect image?? Perhaps I should ask “What the Duck”? I personally believe there is an 80/20 rule going on with editing, and that the extended amount of time required to get that last 20% is not worth the effort unless I have a damn good reason to incur the “time” cost. Or I’m getting paid for it…

Next time I get philosophical, I think I’ll talk about copyright…