Travel Photo Editing On The Go: My Ideal Workflow Tips

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Photography is the fun part - but travel photo editing is where the magic happens! — Photography is the fun part – but travel photo editing is where the magic happens

As a travel photographer, one of the things I have to consider is how I am going to backup, catalogue, and even edit my photos (and occasional videos) while travelling.

All travel photographers have their own travel photo editing workflow, but since a few people have asked about mine, I thought I’d pop it all down in this blog post so you can see what works for me.

Of course, there is no right or wrong way to do any of this, but after 20 years as a photographer, this is the system I have ended up with, and so far it seems to work well. You may have your own routine that you’re happy with, or you may be interested in learning what other photographers do so you can get ideas and adapt your own workflow. Either way, I hope this helps!

NOTE: This is a review of my experiences using Adobe Creative Cloud. I was given a year’s subscription by the lovely people at Adobe – but I have been a Creative Cloud user since it came out (and before that I used Adobe Creative Suite), so it was already an application that I knew and loved. All opinions are honestly held and I don’t accept freebies or payment in exchange for positive reviews.

I often do travel photo editing while travelling abroad

Travel photo editing with Adobe Creative Cloud

The core of my travel photography editing workflow is Adobe Creative Cloud. This is a suite of applications for all kinds of creative projects, from photo and video editing to graphic design, web development, animation and much more.

Adobe also offers cloud-based editing and storage, fonts, stock images and online tutorials, so it’s adaptable to whatever you do and however you choose to work. In fact, there are so many options it’s a bit overwhelming, and I’ve barely even scratched the surface of all the different ways you can use it.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a great tool for travel photo editing

There are various packages ranging from a smaller (and cheaper) bundle of apps aimed just at photographers, to one that includes every programme in the Creative Cloud suite. For the last few years, I’ve subscribed to the photography package, which includes Bridge, Lightroom, and Photoshop.

Adobe Bridge: The central hub of the Creative Cloud suite. It’s really just a file management programme where you can view, sort, label, and organise your images.
Adobe Lightroom: The application I use the most. Lightroom is where I back up my images, do all my photo editing and then export the images at different sizes depending on what’s needed.
Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop is a more advanced image editing tool, with many more advanced functions, most of which I don’t use. As a travel photographer I only make basic adjustments to my images as I prefer to keep them as real and authentic as possible. So I only use Photoshop very rarely.

I use Adobe Bridge to sort and manage all my images

For creating videos, the other programme I use is Premiere Pro. This isn’t included in the photography package, so you need to get a separate subscription or simply buy the ‘All apps’ package.

Adobe Premiere Pro: This is Adobe’s answer to Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer. While it has some very high-powered editing capabilities, it’s also simple and user-friendly enough for a novice like me who just wants something with a bit more oomph than Apple’s iMovie or any other basic, free, video editing software.

Backing up images as a travel photographer

If you’re only going away for a week or two, it’s entirely possible not to do any backing up at all. A single memory card (or perhaps two) is plenty for most people, and then you can download all your images when you get home.

However, if your camera gets lost, damaged or stolen and you haven’t backed up, you’d lose all your images! And if, like me, you travel for longer than a couple of weeks, or you take a lot of images, or you’re shooting high-resolution RAW files, you’ll soon run out of memory card space.

So that’s why, even if I do nothing else while I’m travelling, I back up. Every day.

As well as my camera and lenses, I always take two backup drives and plenty of memory cards

Storing images while travelling

Adobe Creative Cloud, as the name implies, offers the ability to store your images in the cloud and edit remotely on the go.

Many people use this option, but it’s not something I do. I’m often travelling in remote places with rubbish wifi, and since my RAW files are huge and I sometimes take many hundreds of images in a single day, it would be impossible to upload them all.

For example, when I spent three months travelling in Guatemala, I ended up taking over 12,000 photos. Uploading them all to the cloud would have been impossible!

So I always travel with two portable 2TB hard drives and I back up my photos to both of them every day. Then I can wipe the memory card and use it again.

It’s important to have two, so that you’re fully protected. Portable drives can and do fail, so I always back up everything twice, in case one breaks or gets stolen. Best practice is to keep them separate from one another, so that if you lose one, you still have the second.

Photographer looking out over Antigua Guatemala — I spent three months doing travel photography in Guatemala, so I needed to store a lot of images

Backing up with Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom is not just an editing tool; it’s also where I back up my images. In the Library module, you can import, rename, label and organise all your files. So as soon as I get back from a day’s shooting, the first thing I do is grab the card out of the camera, plug it into my card reader, and use Lightroom to download all the files.

I organise them by year, then by date and location, and then within that folder I’ll have different folders for file types, such as RAW files, iPhone photos, videos, and later I’ll add folders for exported high-res images for printing or low-res ones for Instagram and this site.

As Lightroom imports them, it will also rename them to something more searchable than a string of numbers, add my name and contact information to the metadata, and apply a preset (about which more in a bit).

Travel Photography On The Road – My Photo Editing Workflow Tips — When doing travel photo editing I sort my images in Adobe Creative Cloud by date, location and file type

Organising with Adobe Lightroom

Once the images are all imported, the next stage for me is sorting, classifying and deleting. I take a LOT of photos, and I definitely don’t need to keep them all! I only rarely delete in camera, so the first step is to go through and get rid of duplicates, dull images, or ones that are just rubbish. I aim to delete 50% of the images I’ve taken during this first pass.

As I go through, I also give the images a star rating, from 1* to 5*. One star for anything I think I will want to edit, two to four for ones that are quite good, and five stars for the images that leap out at me as the very best.

Then, as soon as possible, I go back through the ones I’ve starred and edit them.

When editing my travel photos, I give each one a star rating in Adobe Lightroom

Using presets in Adobe Lightroom

The two main areas of Lightroom that I use are the Library and Develop modules. In the Library I can sort, tag and label my images. There is also a basic editing function, but I prefer to do all my editing in the Develop module.

As I mentioned, all my images get a preset applied as I import them. A preset, as the name suggests, is group of pre-set photo editing settings, that you can apply to give all your images a similar look, to save you having to manually apply the same settings to every image.

You can create your own, use the selection that comes free with Lightroom, or download them from other photographers on the internet.

I like bold, colourful images, so my preset corrects the exposure where necessary and adds a little boost of brightness, contrast and vibrancy. Not too much – I still want them to look authentic and not over-processed – just a bit to give the image a bit of punch and take away any flatness.

But you can choose the look that suits you – whether that’s with more or less contrast, brighter or more subdued highlights, black and white, or any other style.

Lightroom has lots of in-built presets to change the look of your image, or you can create your own

Travel photo editing with Adobe Lightroom

But the software doesn’t always get it right, and my preset won’t correct things like a wonky horizon, high-ISO noise, or unsatisfactory framing. So the most important part of my editing process is to go through the images I’ve starred, one by one, and give each a very quick polish. That includes checking I’m happy with what the preset has done and adjusting it if not, correcting the white balance, cropping, reducing noise or adding a mask to bring out details in the sky.

I probably spend no more than about 30-60 seconds tweaking each image, but I might edit 100 images at a time, so it soon adds up!

Editing photos in my hostel in Guatemala

Most of those images will never get published or shared, and sometimes people ask me why I don’t only edit the ones I know I’m going to put on this blog or my Instagram.

The answer is that sometimes an image doesn’t come into its own until you edit it. There have been plenty of occasions where I thought a photo wasn’t that great, but with a bit of polish, suddenly it becomes a keeper.

I really like working in Adobe Lightroom because the whole process is so quick and simple. You can tweak as little or as much as you like using the various sliders, and you can also edit a group of images in bulk or copy and paste adjustments from one image to another.

The Lightroom develop module has easy-to use sliders for adjusting and correcting your images

Exporting with Adobe Lightroom

Once I’m happy with my edits, I can then use Lightroom’s export function to export the corrected RAW files. You can save different presets, so I have one for Instagram, one for the blog, another for high-res jpegs, and so on.

As you export you can also get Lightroom to pop a watermark on, which is very handy if, like me, you’re posting a lot of images online and want to digitally sign your work.

Lightroom's export function makes it easy to export images in any size or format — Lightroom’s export function makes it easy to export images in any size or format

Travel photo editing workflow – back home

I’m not much of a party girl and, especially if I’m travelling solo, I’m quite happy spending my evenings editing photos. So if I’m lucky, I can sometimes manage to get a lot of editing done while still on the road. When I went to photograph animals in Antarctica, I managed to get all my editing done before we returned to dry land!

Once I get home, there is one more job to do, and that’s store everything correctly. I have two big external hard drives (again, master and backup), so I copy all the images from my portable hard drive to the master drive.

At this point, the Lightroom catalogue will still try to connect with the portable drive, and if I unplug it, Lightroom will think the images are missing. So the final task is to use the ‘Find Missing Folder’ tool in the Lightroom library module to redirect it to the folder’s new location on my master hard drive. This way I won’t lose any of the hours of editing I’ve done – which would be a disaster!

I prefer editing travel photos at home as I have a comfy desk and a big monitor

Creating travel videos using Adobe Creative Cloud

While in Guatemala I volunteered as a photographer for Trama Textiles, a non-profit cooperative based in Xela that works with weaving communities.

During the Civil War many Maya women lost their husbands, fathers and brothers, so they had to fend for themselves. Weaving gorgeous textiles using the traditional back strap loom is the main way they can support their families.

A woman doing backstrap loom weaving, an important tradition in Guatemala — Backstrap loom weaving is an important tradition in Guatemala

Organisations like Trama Textiles help them to get fair prices for their work, and sell their products online. They also support them with grants and fundraising to help them survive and look after their children.

My role was mainly to photograph products for the online shop, and take photos of the weavers at work for newsletters and promotional materials.

But I was also asked to make a short film documenting their journey towards creating products made entirely with natural dyes instead of chemical dyes.

I shot the film using my iPhone 13 Pro, and edited it using Premiere Pro, Adobe’s editing programme that comes as part of the Creative Cloud package.

Adobe Premiere Pro timeline — The timeline of my film, complete with captions

Travel video editing tutorials and tips

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that my main job for the last 18 years has been directing documentaries. That means I have sat in more edits than I can remember – but I always work with a professional editor.

So although I have a very good understanding of the editing process and how to cut a film together, I’m not all that familiar with the various editing programmes themselves.

Three years ago I volunteered in Uganda, and filmed and cut a few short videos using a Canon camera and Adobe Premiere Pro, but it’s been a while since I used it.

So my memory of the programme and where the various tools and functions are was rather rusty!

Fortunately Adobe offers loads of practical guides and online tutorials to help you get started, and if ever you’re stuck on a particular action, a simple Google search will quickly bring up advice on how to do it.

Premiere Pro has built-in tutorials to help you find your way around

Editing travel videos using Premiere Pro

Since this was the first time I’d used Premiere Pro in a while, I took full advantage of the online tutorials while cutting my short film.

I learned how to import my footage, how to sort and label it, and how to select part of a clip and put it on the timeline. I also learned how to add transitions, effects and music, and how to add captions.

This is all pretty basic editing, and I found it quite easy to learn how to do it in Premiere Pro.

The programme has many more advanced features that I didn’t use, but I can definitely see myself using it again if I want to make more short videos for Instagram or YouTube in the future. It’s much more responsive and you have a lot more choice and control than in free applications like iMovie.

If you’d like to see how the film turned out, here it is!