22 hours of editing for 1 series

When I talk to people they think that being a photographer of nudes is a dream-job that consists of looking and enjoying at the beautiful charms of young naked girls all day and at night, too.

Well, in the first part (dream-job) they are absolutely right, I wouldn't want to change anything :-)

But - while it's true that of course I enjoy (a lot!) what I see in the sessions, a photographer who denies it would be a liar... - taking photos is more or less the smallest part of my work.

Not to talk about the huge amount of time it needs to search and find models, creating and uploading search ads, answering countless mostly useless messages, interviews, test shots, having appointments and time reserved for sessions that finally don't take place because the model is sick, simply forgot about it, the boyfriend got jealous, she didn't want to grow pubic hair....or, or, or... 

Also not to talk about the time it needs to try to make some money of the finished images. Where to sell them, to whom? How? Where to promote my work (it's not easy when you're into nudes instead of weapons, violence, cruelty or another topic considered healthy and safe for all audiences in so-called social networks and search engines - even here I am excluded from the sites search function...). Also here, of course, a lot of trial, a lot of wasted time, a lot of messaging...

There are many more tasks...

Taking the photos actually is quite a small part of what a photographer does. Apart of the things just described, today I want to show you the workflow of how a series of photos develops, that I upload here on Patreon.

After the session I copy all files from the camera's card to my hard disk and from there to two separate external back-up hard-disks, several times a year I copy all new sessions (and finished edits) to other hard disks in Switzerland, so that even in the worst case I have copies saved. All those disks are strongly encrypted, which means that even if somebody steals them or the computer, s/he cannot read the data.

Of each picture I have two versions: the RAW file and a JPEG that the camera produces. I copy the jpeg's into a working folder of my digikam-software. Remember: I work on Linux using open-source software and digikam for sure is a fantastic image managing software, in fact much better than anything I tried on Win or Mac (it is available for those systems, too, in case you're interested).

In this folder I make the selection of the images I want to edit (here, the first photo with the thumbnails). There are always several very similar photos and I open them side by side and decide for the ones I like most. The rest of those jpeg's I delete.

The second, color, image shows the original unedited jpeg image as the camera produced it.

According to the list of the selected images I copy the original raw files into a separate folder (I always work with copies, never touch the originals). To "develop" them I use Canon's software which unfortunately doesn't run under Linux. So I start a Windows 10 in a virtual machine ("virtualBox", a program that allows to run several operating systems under another system) and have a full Windows in a window on my normal Linux desktop.

In Canon's program among other things I can adjust the white balance (colors). Most of the time I have to do some adjustments separately for each single image. My settings are saved and when I finished adjusting all the images I start a batch-process that then transforms to raw files into jpeg's according to my settings.

In this sample I converted the original to black and white. 

It's the first image you see in the gif above. It's nice, but they greys are not exactly exciting. It's all a bit dull, not really the contrast I want.

So I open the image in the Gimp (the open-source "photo-shop" - also available for free as well for Linux, Windows and Mac) and adjust the contrast using the adjust tool. The curve you see is the actual curve I used for that image. You see that I darkened the middle to dark grays to achieve more profound blacks and darken the background. I also brightened a little bit the brighter grays in Yana's marvelous body to distinguish her more from the background. 

As you can see in the second photo in the gif, the image looks much better now, the contrast is much more beautiful. But, because I darkened the already dark, unfortunately all details in Yana's wonderful hair and her lovely dark bush got lost and those wild hairs that invite so much to play are just black areas. So, I undo the contrast tool and select her hair and those cozy curly hairs down there. I don't have to select them very precisely because I am going to soften the selection so there will be no visible border. 

Now I reverse the selection: now everything in the image is selected except the hair and the bush, and apply again the contrast tool that now applies only to the selected parts, while the hairs stay as they were.

Finally I softly retouch the corrected image. Here I just had to take away some small spots on the skin. But sometimes, depending on the skin of the model, only this step - cleaning skin carefully - takes me 10 to 15 minutes for each image. Not here: just some clicks. So here's the final image.

All in all I needed about 15 minutes to edit one image. The series I recently uploaded for my "power"-patrons had 85 images - 22 hours of editing. Or, pauses and other tasks included: 3 to 4 days of work for photos I took exactly in 23 minutes, between 20h48 and 21h11... (the session continued and I'll upload the rest in some days - when edited :-) )

After the editing work it is still not finished...

I must resize the images for my Patreon-Gallery and place the watermark. It is a script that I wrote that does that for me, I just have to start it and wait until it finished. Then I select two images, one as the preview of the series for my signal-patrons (which I forgot for the last series but will do now...) and one as the title image for the patrons of the level for which I will publish the series.

I upload the series to my server into the gallery. Finally I resize them to the smaller Patreon-size, upload the preview and the title image to the Patreon page and try to write a not too stupid text that I hope is interesting or at least fun to read.  

Now you know that it's not (only ;-) ) laziness why sometimes it takes a while until I can publish a new series. Thanks for your patience!