Good detailed description Larry. Some good ideas here.
I won’t go into my workflow now nor attempt a complete compare/contrast. But I
do note a couple of things:
1 - your Lightroom workflow as described is pretty much all about filing and
storing for ease of retrieval.
2- You say
> I'll make gross technical adjustments that apply to groups of photos,
> and only rarely tweak specific photos
The major departure of my workflow from yours is that for me no image rises
above a 2 rating until I have spent at least a few seconds looking at color,
contrast, sharpness, noise and other aspects. If I have worked on an image
and/or don’t think in needs much if any additional post processing, then it
gets a 3 rating. Once I have finished with a day or week or month’s worth of
images, I go back to the 3 rated ones and decide whether they are worth
additional time, good to go as they are, or maybe overrated and reassigned a 1
or 2. If I am doing a themed gallery (e.g., "My Trip to the Store” or “Memories
of My Friend Mrs. Smith”) I may dip into the 1s and 2s if I need to find an
image to tell part of my story but would mostly work from 3s and above.
The thing I most like about Lightroom is that is does not force any sort of
workflow. So you can do it your way, I can do it my way, and we are each taking
advantage of the capabilities in the program that matter to us.
stan
> On Jun 19, 2017, at 6:49 PM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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 [email protected] (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc
>
>
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