Today is going to be fun I hope – I’m going to show you how I edit.? I don’t claim it’s the ONLY way.? I’m not even sure it’s the BEST way.? But it’s fast.? REALLY fast.

This image was shot over grey instead of white because I like the flexibility of being able to isolate on white OR having some texture to a background if I want to colorize the available texture with some sort of blend mode.? For stock, I’d always turn this white though and let the buyer decide what to do with it later.

The entire edit ends up taking less than 2 minutes.? You can add another 15 seconds because after I finished recording I realized his shirt had a few small mistakes on the edge so I cleaned it up.? At any rate, editing at this speed would give you 30 images per hour or slightly under.? At even 20 images an hour, you could edit 100 images in 5 hours.? That would be quick and gives you 3 hours of “work day” to keyword, upload, push and submit those 100 images.? People have asked me before how I plan to sub 100 a day – this is the general idea.? Of course some days you have to shoot.? Some days you don’t get 100 edited and subbed.? Heck, MOST days I don’t.

Every trick you can learn will help you.? The difference in 10 images per hour and 15 is also the same as 1000 online vs 1500 or 10,000 vs. 15,000.? The difference in 5 images per hour and 30 is 6x your income each month.? Speed IS necessary.

Click the photo above for the video on what I did.? There’s no audio – it’s a visual process.? Tools used:

• Wand – grab the grey background.
• Lasso – select and unselect with shift and alt after the initial selection has been made.
• Feather 1, backspace – clear the grey background.
• F5 – custom action for curves.? Just brightens it up 2 steps.? I undid one to find a happy balance.
• [ and ] to resize the brush.
• Dodge/highlights around the hair.
• Eraser to trim unclean edges.
• Contrast for skin tone.
• Clone for the logo.
• Brush – for the screwdriver (alt-clicked the color nearby to grab it)
• Smart sharpen – 60/1.3 I think.
• After the vid ends, I also used clone on the edge of the shirt a bit.

To show you what my 2 minutes did, I’ve uploaded a watermarked version of this finished image to here.? One of my next goals is to upload some actual Photoshop tutorials – one using only the keyboard, NO mouse.? One as a speed drill and whatever else you guys want.