A friend asked about going through 7500 photos from his trip to the UK,
so I wrote up my workflow for him. I get teased a lot for treating my
shutter like film was free, but this is what works for me. By throwing
away 550,000 photos, I end up with a hundred good ones.
On the remote chance someone is interested in how I do it and it would
be helpful to them, here's an outline of my workflow
The premise that for the first several passes quick decisions are better
than right decisions, so if you can't decide whether something is worth
keeping, just keep it and move on.
I also (to a first approximation) don't throw files away, because I've
had my two star files be the best recent photo of a friend who recently
died.
My nominal rating system is: (total 560k photos in lightroom)
0: unrated (90k)
1: significant technical errors (2600, most could be deleted, many have
been)
2: nothing particularly wrong, but not worth looking at (314k)
3: good enough to post on the web (152k)
4: good enough to spend money on a print (3k)
5: My absolute best work (38)
Note that I don't post everything that is a 3 star, nor do I print every
4 star. I probably have another 50-100 that I should bump up to 5 stars.
workflow, first load the files onto the system with basic keywording,
before any basic rating.
Import raw files into lightroom (shooting jpeg is like throwing away
your negatives, and with lightroom and cheap hard drives saves you nothing)
I have a directory structure of 6 month top level directories,
directories for each month, and directories for each logical photo session.
/Volumes/photo_c/photo4/pictures_2017a/1701
in 1701 I have
170103_jan_eriksson
170103_power_line
170104_macro_test
170104_tail_lights
170106_covered_bridge
170107_tv_van
Note that each top directory for each shoot is named with the date, and
some short description. This way in addition to LR cataloging, I also
have a logical directory structure in case I ever change my photo
management software.
I may also sort things into subdirectories below that. This makes it
easier to compare like with like when rating. For example with a band,
I'll put photos of each band member in a separate directory.
As soon as I enter my photos, I do basic keywording, at some point I'll
also do facial recognition and try to ID people.
I have an SSD primary drive, and that is where I load my files to
initially. When I'm all done with my photos from each shoot, they go
into long term storage in the above calendar directory tree.
Now the bit you were asking about.
I tell lightroom to only show unrated photos. I go quickly through them
setting any one I might like to 3 stars. When I get to the end, I set
the rest to two stars. If something is totally trash, I set it to one
star. If I know right off hand it's amazing I "pick" then set it to
three stars.
I tend to do this for all of my directories.
At this point I'll make gross technical adjustments that apply to groups
of photos, and only rarely tweak specific photos. I'll often do color
balance at this point, finding something black or silver to set my white
balance on.
I then go to the end of each directory, and working backwards "pick"
each one that I think is good enough to look at further.
At that point I start setting up a collection structured, using
collection sets and collection.
In the collection set 170601_england I will then go through and make
collections of all of my picked files based on the directory names:
170603_canterbury_00
I then select everything in canerbury_00, unpick it, then starting from
the front, pick the ones I like the best. those become
170603_canterbury_01, then from the end canterbury_02, lather, rinse repeat.
Once things get into lightroom collections, and I've narrowed them down
by 60-80% then I start doing more fine adjusting, cropping, specific
tweaking of the curves.
At some point, I will often ask someone to go through and rate the
photos 6 (red/dislike), 7 (yellow/meh), 8 (green/like). Of those I may
go and over ride some with 9 (blue, I really like even if you don't).
I'll use purple for "special selections" such as "sensei likes this".
I'll also keyword photos "bill likes" or "bill dislikes", or "don't post
on facebook".
I will be far less selective for photos on facebook, particularly event
photos, than for photos on flickr.
From the photos I put on flickr, my absolute best for each month go
into my monthly picks folder, which goes into my collection of monthly
favorites, in theory, every one in that collection is rated four stars.
I tend to average about three or four shots a month that end up in that
collection.
In short, if I wouldn't be willing to spend $4 for a 12x8 print of
something, it doesn't get 4 stars. In theory a photo could get that
rating at any time in the process, but it's generally not until it's
been posted and moved to my monthly favorites
--
Larry Colen l...@red4est.com (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc
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