Best way/place to learn some editing skills

Cygnus Studios

In my infinite wisdom, I had made the decision that in 2017 our studio would offer to directly work with some smaller local/regional clients. I didn't quite think this through entirely, so I am now committed to actually learning some basic photo editing. Our large clients handle whatever editing might be needed after production, so we've never learned it.

I know that there is a million and two videos on youtube, but that would require far more time and effort than this deserves. If this working for smaller clients continues I will eventually bring in a full time editor, but in the meantime is there a central source that offers the general basic editing techniques?

We're not going to go overboard with this offering things like cgi, I am thinking more like simple effects. Basically what I want is to be able to do quick things in photoshop that would help eliminate or at least significantly curb the time we would spend on the set to create. Water ripples, motion blur, and other little things that just take hours to do on the set.

I want quick and dirty little techniques that can be done in minutes by us inexperienced editors.

Cygnus Studios

We use an outside editing company to do our editorial image editing (when the clients don't do it themselves). It is the smaller once a year clients or one time clients that I'm thinking of trying to do ourselves.

I bought a copy of elements a few months back to play around with, just to kind of get my feet wet but quite honestly I hate editing images. I can't seem to wrap my head around spending the time doing it. Our studio is so busy right now that anything that takes time away from taking the image is just costing us money.

I'll have to really spend some time crunching the numbers to see if it is cheaper to do it ourselves (poorly and slowly), hire a full time editor, or keep farming it out. My guess is that it is cheaper to farm it out, but I haven't spent the time to work out the math yet.

Since most of what we do is catalog, there is no editing involved, it's just the editorial and magazine work that gets edited and that is only about 30% of what we do.

Thanks for the links, I'll check it out.