You can edit a day of travel photos on your phone in fifteen minutes. The trick is to keep only a handful, fix them in the same order, and reuse your best edit as a starting point. Lightroom Mobile's free tier covers the basics used here.
Minutes 1 to 5: choose
Go through the day's photos and flag only the ones you'd show someone. For most days, that's between three and ten. Reject near-duplicates without mercy. Editing fewer photos is the biggest time saving in this workflow.
Minutes 5 to 12: edit in this order
- Crop and straighten. Fix the horizon and cut distractions from the edges before you touch colour.
- White balance. Make whites look white, then go slightly warmer if you want a golden hour feel.
- Exposure and contrast. Pull highlights down and lift shadows a little.
- Texture and clarity, sparingly. A little goes a long way, and faces rarely need any.
- Colour. Take saturation down a touch and raise vibrance instead, which protects skin tones.
Minutes 12 to 15: batch and export
Save your best edit of the day as a preset, apply it to the rest of the set, and adjust exposure on each one. Consistency across a set is what reads as a style. Export at full resolution for keeping, and smaller for social media.
Mistakes to avoid
- Too much saturation. If the sky looks radioactive, back off.
- Editing at full brightness in a dark room, which makes photos look dark later.
- Too many filters. Build one preset you like and refine it over the next fifty photos.
- Editing before backing up. Copy the originals first.
Back up the same day
Copy each day's photos to a second place before you format a card or delete from your phone. A cloud copy over wifi or a small SSD in another bag will both do. Losing a laptop is bad, and losing every photo from a year abroad is worse.
Once you've got a style, you can think about selling your photos. Better shots make editing easier, so spend time on composition too.