Picking the Winners

Photo Editing Tip for Beginners

Snowy Shadows

I think the single most important photo editing tip for beginners I can give is simply, Pick the Winners. The concept is simple, just pick the best photos from the set every time you go shooting. The concept is simple, but in practice, it may be a little challenging for many people.

One of the recent trends I have seen in photo editing tutorials is the concept of how to do many photos very quickly. They seem to treat it as a volume business, where the more images you process, the better. They want you to learn to edit one photo, and then apply the settings to hundreds of photos.. edit in minutes not hours.. edit automatically.. This seems to assume that all of your photos are worth editing, and that every edit will be the same.

IMHO nothing could be further from the truth. All of your photos are unique. Not all of your photos are worth editing.

Pick the Winners

If you have 5-10% of your photos that are worth editing, I would say you are doing very well. Part of the challenge of deciding what photos to edit is determining what your photography goals are. Do you just want to post a lot of photos online? If that is your goal, lots of quick edits will likely do just fine.

If on the other hand, your goal is to show yourself as a good photographer, you want to be a bit more selective about which images you choose to edit. At some point, you may want to transition from being a good photographer to being an artist. With this, the best photo editing tip for beginners that I can give is simply, pick the winners.

This concept has been around for a while, and I believe professional photographers live by it. ‘Pick the Winners‘ is a way of approaching it that I learned at a Tony Corbell workshop. The workshop was lead by three great professional photographers, including Laurie Rubin. Each of them confided that they really only focus on editing a small percentage of the photos they take. They also acknowledged that even they take photos that just did not work out and are not worth spending time to edit.

Why I picked photos to edit

I think I was fairly typical of photographers before I learned how to apply this concept. I have been known to take a LOT of frames in an afternoon when shooting wildlife. While downloading all my images, I was thinking about shots that got me excited while I was out and how I was feeling while shooting. I think this leads to the things that can prevent us from picking the winners.

  • We get excited about specific shots.
  • We feel the moment of that excitement.
  • Some shots get personal.

These are not bad things. My photos are very personal to me, and I get very excited remembering the moment I captured what I thought would be a great shot! That doesn’t always translate into the shot actually being great, or even good. I know for me, this is not just a wildlife photography issue, it applies to any type of photos I take.

A photo can look great in the moment on the LCD screen on my camera, but when I really look at it on my computer, it may not be as good as I was hoping for.