Why I Don’t Edit All My Images As Soon As I Get Home

I’ve heard plenty of photographers over the years talk about reviewing and then editing all of their images from a trip, finishing that, and moving on to the next trip and those edits. It’s almost treated like a project that has to be completed before you can move on, and there is no looking back. Once they are done with the edits, they are done with the trip. 

While there is nothing wrong with that approach, I tend to NOT edit all of my images from each trip as soon as I get home. For sure I edit several of them - and even edit some while I am still on the trip - but I never go through and edit everything right away.

Why? I prefer to let some of them simmer. My assumption is that my editing skills and creative eye will both improve over time - and my editing preferences will change - and thus I like to come back to older trips with a fresh perspective on things, and a greater ability to create a gorgeous image (however I define that for the image). I also find that thanks to my improved skills, I can take images that I initially overlooked and bring them to life in a more convincing way. I have countless examples of this being true.

So what does this practice do for me? It rewards me for being patient and continuing to invest in developing my skills. It gives me a wonderful wander down memory lane, thinking about the moments that I captured. And it gives me a higher percentage of keepers, to be honest. If I edited all of them right away, it’s likely that many of those final results would be ok instead of (potentially) good, and some of them I would have skipped over altogether.

But of course, this also means that I have thousands of unedited images that will likely never see the light of day, because I too suffer from “shiny object syndrome” (that is, getting distracted by the newest stuff I capture). My entire catalog is somewhere around 300,000 images at this point, so there’s a lot still to get to, though I never will if I’m being honest. But that’s ok, and I don’t mind. It’s something to do “some day”.

And I never really consider myself “finished” with a folder of images from a trip either. I find myself going back and re-editing images I have already shared (sometimes more than once). It may be because I am trying a new technique that I’ve learned, or a new filter in a product I’ve had for a while, or even a new product that I am trying to learn. But it’s pretty common for me to do this. It’s kind of like the “simmering” I referred to earlier, except these images were already edited. But I do have new skills, and maybe new tools, so re-editing an image is common practice around here. Most of the time, I find that it’s improved. Not really surprising, is it? If we practice, we tend to get better.

So that’s what I think about editing images as soon as I return home from a trip. Edit and share several of them, but allow others to simmer. Worst case, edit all you want but come back to that folder someday and see what a fresh perspective and new skills (or new tools) bring to it. I bet you will be surprised, and impressed with yourself as well. And, perhaps most importantly, I bet you will find more keepers.