This is what I'm doing today:
removing the glass pedestal from this type of image. Approximately 155 times. Next time I'm suspending that mannequin. I think that would save me about four hours.
Since the digital photography revolution, I often encounter, on my sets and on others', a kind of 'We'll take care of it in post' dismissal of problems. I generally try to think long and hard about what the 'taking care of it' will look like. If it's something I can automate, and it's actually difficult to take care of on the set, I'll go with the Photoshop solution.
Last year, I didn't think hard enough. We built a floor out of Ikea flooring, which wasn't so bad, but the studio floor was horribly uneven, so the panels of flooring fit together very poorly. This meant that the seams were really obvious. I knew I could clone it out, but I assumed that I could automate brushstrokes, so we went ahead.
When I started doing the retouching, I discovered that one cannot, in fact, automate a brush stroke. So I had to clone out the seams by hand. On 175 images. I did the same damn six brush strokes 175 times.
Twenty minutes of fixing the floor in reality, versus 360 minutes of fixing the floor in Photoshop. Sometimes it's easier in the analog world.