The Power of Waiting
Smartphone photography has brought unprecedented immediacy to our creative process. We capture an image and can edit it seconds later, sometimes even applying filters before pressing the shutter button. Yet this immediacy, while convenient, might rob us of one of the most valuable tools in the photographer's psychological toolkit: time and distance from our work. This article explores the significant benefits of waiting before editing photographs and examines common pitfalls that occur when we rush the editing process.
Historical Patience in Photography
The concept of waiting in photography is not new. In the analogue era, photographers experienced built-in waiting periods that digital photographers must now deliberately create. The darkroom process required photographers to delay gratification by necessity.
From the stifling mid-nineteenth-century portable tents to modern darkroom facilities, the development process enforced a separation between capture and creation. One historical account notes that some photographers found this time in the darkroom transportive: "The hours pass by without being perceived," while developing "scene after scene, and reminding one of some pleasant incident of their trip."
This enforced pause in the creative workflow allowed photographers to approach their developed negatives with a fresh perspective. The spatial and temporal distance between exposure, development, and printing created a natural incubation period for the image.
The Psychology of Creative Incubation
Research on creativity suggests that taking a break from a creative task can significantly improve outcomes. This phenomenon, known as the incubation period, occurs when initial conscious thought is followed by a period of refraining from the task. This allows the mind to rest and process the information more effectively.
Studies have found that engaging in undemanding activities during an incubation period leads to significantly more creative solutions compared to continuing work without breaks. This improvement results from unconscious associative processing that continues even as we direct our attention elsewhere.
In his writing about creativity, Christopher P. Jones notes that while we often imagine creativity as an explosive act, the reality usually involves "waiting, discarding, over-painting, re-modelling, hesitating, starting again, pondering." Jones explains that creative ideas rarely arrive as lightning bolts, but rather as a "steady accumulation... much like the way a pot left beneath a dripping tap eventually becomes full."
Benefits of Waiting Before Editing
1. Restoring Objective Vision
The more time we spend editing an image, the more our perception of it changes. After several hours with a single photograph, many photographers report losing the ability to distinguish between good and poor edits. This phenomenon extends beyond a single editing session; images we've spent significant time with become too familiar to evaluate correctly.
Photographers on online forums frequently discuss the value of waiting: "I edit photos a few days after taking them. This allows me some emotional distance from the photographs so that I can see them more objectively." This detachment helps photographers evaluate an image's technical and aesthetic qualities without the emotional attachment that often forms during the creation process.
Some people take the waiting process further, printing out a first draft of their photograph and living with it hanging on the wall for days or weeks before making a second pass at editing it.
2. Revealing Hidden Flaws
Returning to an image after some time away often reveals issues that were previously overlooked. Colour casts, contrast problems, or compositional weaknesses become more apparent when viewing with fresh eyes. As one photographer explains, "If you leave an edited image for an hour, a day, or a week or two, you might notice problems you weren't aware of before".
3. Separating Emotion from Evaluation
Photographs carry emotional weight for their creators. We remember the circumstances, challenges, and excitement of making an image, which can cloud our judgment of its objective quality. Waiting before editing helps separate the experience of taking a photo from its actual visual merit.
Some photographers recommend avoiding looking at images on location to prevent emotional attachment from influencing editing decisions. This pause helps photographers select and edit based on the image's standalone quality rather than the memory of creating it.
4. Improving Client Experience
Professional photographers can enhance client satisfaction by being patient in sharing and editing their work. As one photographer suggests, sharing pictures within hours of taking them "can send your clients a signal that your work is no different than anyone else with a halfway decent camera". Waiting allows for more thoughtful selection and refined editing, ultimately delivering a superior final product.
Common Pitfalls of Hasty Editing
When we edit images too quickly or continuously without breaks, several common problems emerge. These issues are particularly prevalent in the smartphone photography era, where powerful editing tools are available immediately after capture.
1. Oversaturation
One of the most common editing mistakes is excessive colour saturation. When you manipulate the sliders for colour saturation or vibrance—as well as contrast, shadows, and highlights—you risk going too far in either direction. It is easy to slip into a ‘more is better’ approach without realising it during a long editing session. Taking a break allows the brain to reset and the photographer to remain within the realms of good taste.
Our eyes are accustomed to natural colour and contrast levels, and extreme saturation, particularly in elements like grass, sky, and skin tones, creates a jarring, unrealistic effect. HDR processing is particularly prone to oversaturation issues, which one photographer colourfully describes as "neon puke". This garish effect occurs when colours are pushed beyond plausible natural limits.
2. Halos and Artefacts
"Halo" has become a catchall term for haziness, softening, loss of contrast, or indistinct detail seen around elements in a photograph. These artefacts frequently result from excessive sharpening, contrast and clarity adjustments, or HDR processing.
Halos are more common in smartphone photography due to the aggressive image processing many phones apply automatically, combined with users adding further enhancements. They typically appear as light or dark outlines around high-contrast edges in an image. The edges of buildings, trees, or landscape features against the sky are common sites for halos to appear.
Interestingly, some photographers view halos as useful warning signs: "Especially when we edit a large number of images at once, we can become blind to over-editing. Halos are unmistakable, showing us that we have gone too far."
3. Oversharpening
Sharpening is intended to enhance the perception of detail; however, excessive application can create unnatural textures and edge artefacts. The clarity slider in editing applications is a frequent culprit—while subtle increases can enhance texture, overuse exaggerates skin imperfections and creates an unflattering, overly processed, “crispy” appearance. This can be particularly troublesome in portrait editing. While some people may be okay with this gritty, ‘warts-and-all’ type of photo edit, most models won't thank you.
Oversharpening is particularly problematic with smartphone images, which generally have sharpening applied by the phone's image processor, even in RAW files.
4. Overprocessed Skin Tones
Hasty adjustments can lead to unrealistic skin appearances when editing portraits. One photographer confesses that when starting out, "people in my photos used to look like KFC fried chicken or the Walking Dead if I shot at night or in a club setting." Natural skin tones should be your reference point during editing, maintaining realistic texture and colour even as other elements are enhanced.
5. Shadow and Highlight Extremes
Pushing shadows too bright or highlights too dark can create flat, unnatural images lacking proper tonal separation. While modern editing tools allow remarkable shadow and highlight recovery, restraint is crucial for maintaining a natural appearance and avoiding banding or noise in recovered areas.
A good rule of thumb is to adjust the histogram to almost touch the black and white ends of the scale without actually clipping. However, remember that there are always exceptions, and you should ask yourself, “Does this make the image look better?”
Practical Application for Smartphone Photographers
Creating Deliberate Distance: For smartphone photographers, the editing delay must be intentional. Consider these approaches:
Separate capturing from culling: After a shooting session, import and back up your images, but avoid immediate editing. Return to them after at least 24 hours have passed.
Implement a cooling-off period: Try using different apps for capturing and editing to create a psychological boundary between these stages.
Schedule editing sessions: Designate specific times for editing rather than editing sporadically throughout the day.
Fresh Perspective Techniques: When you return to edit your images, these techniques can help maintain objectivity:
Compare to reference images: Look often at your original, unedited image. Most editing software provides a handy button for this. Examine examples of professional work in the same genre to determine whether your processing remains within natural parameters.
Change display size: View images at different sizes and on other screens to notice details that might be missed at a single scale.
Flip images upside down: This technique makes images appear abstract, helping you evaluate overall balance, rhythm, weight, contrast, and brightness without being distracted by subject recognition.
Temporarily remove colour: Converting to black and white during editing allows you to focus on tonal relationships without colour distractions.
Resources
This video from Mike Smith of Boxhead Mike Photography provides a very clear run-through of the most common editing pitfalls we’ve discussed above and ways to spot and correct them easily.
“Today, I show you seven over-editing mistakes you need to avoid right now! It is so easy to over-edit your photographs, and the worst thing is that they might look good to you, but to everyone else, they won't. The even worse thing is that no one will tell you. So check out these seven photo editing mistakes and ensure you are not guilty of making them!”
And this video, from Peter McKinnon, is an excellent and very funny take on editing pitfalls in photography: “This video is a follow-up to a previous video about beginner photography mistakes, focusing on common editing errors. The presenter, Peter McKinnon, shares five editing mistakes that they've made in the past and encourages viewers to avoid them, including over-editing, cropping incorrectly, forgetting to export master files, over-smoothing skin tones, and using clichéd editing techniques.”
Give It a Try!
The power of waiting in image editing represents an essential counterbalance to our culture of immediacy. By deliberately creating distance between capturing and editing, photographers can gain perspective, make informed decisions, and avoid common editing pitfalls.
This approach connects us to photography's historical roots, when technical limitations enforced patience, while simultaneously applying psychological insights about creative incubation. For smartphone photographers, in particular, instituting deliberate waiting periods can significantly improve final results.
As you develop your editing workflow, consider including these pauses not as obstacles to productivity but as essential elements of the creative process. The patience you cultivate is the difference between good images and truly outstanding photographs.
