Question about photo editing

[Vinny]

Since I am gearing up to buy a DSLR, I would like to know how much time do people spend on photo editing.

With digital point and shoot I have played around with red eye removal, lightening and darkening the photo and maybe contrast. I have spent maybe 20 minutes on the photo - most of that time is to load the program since my computer is older.

I have used Photoscape, whatever HP had in their bundle, Power Goo (more for fun effects) and now am using Picasa. I have no clue about what I will be using once I get the DSLR, I know that Photoshop is the "standard" and read some good things about Serif's Photo editing software. I can't see myself spending a lot of time editing photos - years ago with film I just pointed, shot 3 times (bracketed) and hoped for the best. With digital I can see that corrections can be made before processing a print (very useful) but do you spend a lot of time after the shot is taken?

 

[Hamtastic]

It just depends on the situation as to how much time I spend shooting and processing. During wedding receptions and live music shows I may shoot many shots per minute. Out on a hike doing landscape photography I may only make 8 exposures all day. How long those will take to process depends a lot on how much control I have over the lighting, or whether the available lighting is cooperating, and what the finished goal for the photograph is. Some photos only require batch processing. I just tell the computer what to do, and then go play video games. Other photos I will examine and work on for hours or even days.

You might look into Adobe Lightroom. It's much cheaper than Photoshop, and covers most of the typical photo processing: color, exposure, contrast, burning, dodging, cropping, spot removal, etc... It doesn't do HDR, pano stitching, combining multiple images, etc...)