I quit editing photos

Adobe's AI noise reduction is absolutely first class. The AI adaptive color feature has also saved me on a ton of old photos taken on older DSLRs and smartphones.

It would be unkind to single anyone out so I am not going to. The thing is, I can for the life of me not think of a single photo influencer/youtuber who is also a popular _photographer_. They're popular influencers/youtubers.

As for what I mean by mediocre: let's say you are looking at a portrait of someone you don't know. If you can't remember it 10-30 minutes later, it was probably mediocre or worse. Would you recognize the subject if you met them on the a street one day later?

Most portraits tend to be bad because they completely fail to capture the subject. People fuss over lighting and editing and color grading and whatnot, but they don't actually pay attention to the person they are shooting. I see quite a few of these people with huge social media followings who can't, for the life of them, take pictures of humans. And yet, they teach their inability to make portraits to others.

I also know professional photographers who are genuinely bad at taking portraits. And then there are those rare people who just nail it most of the time. Notice this when looking at a portrait of someone you know. Is it "them"?

Another category where you see a lot of bad photos is wildlife photography. You will see endless pictures of birds that possibly could go in a bird-spotting book purely for identification purposes. But, to steal a line from my wife after looking at a certain facebook group "it's just a bunch of tack sharp ducks set against blurred out sky". And my wife spends an inordinate amount of time looking at birds.

All you need to make bad nature photography is a big lens, a location and some time. It takes no talent. All you need to make technically good, but completely pointless nature photos is a big lens, a location, time and a decent modern camera. Then turn on 3D tracking and spray whenever something moves. Animals live in nature -- they belong in context -- they do things. Good nature photographers manage to communicate this.

(I was actually tempted to name the "it's just a bunch of tack sharp ducks..."-group, but I'm not going to. Though it isn't that hard to guess).

We drown in technically excellent images that are dull as crap.

(To be clear: I'm a mediocre photographer. I'm very aware of it. I occasionally shoot something that may be worth looking at -- but still rarely something you'd remember)

The question I why did you edit photos? What was goal? Why were you doing it in the first place?

I guess the thing you have discovered shooting analog is that each click is a finite resource so you spend more time composing and being aware of the scene before you take the photo.

Saving £20 is nice.

Having your 36 snapshots developed at a decent lab will cost you more.

In you are paying them additionally for edits as well you are on longer saving money. You just pay someone else.

Or are you giving it to a company that runs it through an automated usually digital these days sometimes analog machine that develops them automatically? Those machines usually do edits as well. But highly automated ones. (I am not sure they make them anymore)

Having my medium format film developed is far from cheap.

Lightroom is far from the only editor out there and it is not a great editor to start with. Lightroom is a Frankenstein combination of of a DAM and an editor.

You probably will want some form of DAM to organize your photos regardless.

Yes, financially doesn't make much sense to go from digital to film. Film costs, absolutely. But you end up shooting less, thinking more, waiting for the right shot and so on. You also move sliders/tweak less and mistakes teach you lessons that you quickly learn from. Sometimes there are happy accidents as well. Taking a shot becomes a deliberate action since you don't have unlimited frames. It's a different experience. Yes, the Adobe light room seems cheap in comparison to film but, that's the wrong comparison IMO. There are other tools out there that are much cheaper than Adobe's offerings if not completely free. Digital has made photography available to the masses, everybody's got a camera nowadays. However, it did kill something and what it killed is what these folk are looking for (that something that got lost in the process).

I'm not into photography anymore and will stick to cheap digital photography for convenience (smart phone) but I could see how this works out for these folks and I believe it's not just a fad or signaling. Similarly, for music, analog instruments could be replicated and enhanced digitally/electronically and yet they're what you're after sometimes.

> I enjoy the moment, and have the memories.

I don't disagree with your "enjoy the moment" thesis, but I also envy your memory recall capability. For me, photos can resurrect memories I don't have access to normally.