When you have lots of shots....

[weepete]

So....I've been away for a few days for wee break with the Mrs who was very tolerant of me snapping away. 4 days away and a cheeky birding session today has seen me with the best part of three CF cards full of images I now need to process! Not having done much photography in the last two years I hadn't realised quite how out of practise I was. Soon got back into it though.

What's your strategy for editing big shoots after you've culled the stuff that's instantly not up to par?

 

[tirediron]

Beer. Lots and lots of beer



Generally speaking, bin the dogs right off the bat, and then go through and rate the remaining images, then walk away and come back the next day and re-review them. From there, I'll process the "#1s" and that's about it.

 

[weepete]

Beer. Lots and lots of beer



Generally speaking, bin the dogs right off the bat, and then go through and rate the remaining images, then walk away and come back the next day and re-review them. From there, I'll process the "#1s" and that's about it.

That sounds entierly sensible mate! Sometimes I do find it hard to judge what will work. Often I end up liking a shot I didn't rate at the time (or soon after) more. I probably also really need to start using the rating system in lightroom!

Having a day or so to let them marinate also makes sense. Makes me wish lightroom had a pre and post editing rating too.

 

[weepete]

Worked a treat. I ended up doing two rounds of editing and used the copy and paste the develop settings quite a bit. After the first round I realised I'd under sharpened pretty much all the shots. But that 288 shots culled down to around 200 and 74 of them ended up with a 4 or 5 star rating. I took my favorite 20 and put them on flickr and my top shots are on here.

That was an effort though and editing is not my favorite thing to do!

Now on to the monster set of 800 I took in the previous three days!

 

[smoke665]

I use Adobe Bridge (part of the subscription pkg) to view and do my first cull right on the card. My HD file system is broken down in to categories Master>categories>sub category>1 Raw>2 Photoshop> 3 Finished>Prints or Web. The remaing images are batch transferred to the "1 Raw" file of each sub category.

In Lr, you can either import or right click on the folder>synchronize to bring them in to Lr. At this point I correct exposure, then WB. Then use the flags to rate those that are questionable. When done in the category, filter>flagged gives me just the questionable images. I review again and remove from disk those that are without any merit and remove from Lr only those that might have use later. Remove the flags on the remainder.

At this point I let it sit for a day or two, then come back and use the stars to rate the images. Any image without a star gets removed from Lr. Generally let it sit another day then review again. Only the 3 star or above get edited in Lr. After that another review/rating and only the 4 star or above get converted to JPEG go to PS for finish editing if required.

 

[smoke665]

@weepete footnote: You may already be aware of this but when rating your images, especially on the initial ratings, I use either the shift>click or crtl>click to select batches of images. Once you have multiples selected, click on one image in the selection, then hit from 1-5 and it will assign the corresponding star rating to all the selected images. The same applies when deleting ratings.

 

[jcdeboever]

So....I've been away for a few days for wee break with the Mrs who was very tolerant of me snapping away. 4 days away and a cheeky birding session today has seen me with the best part of three CF cards full of images I now need to process! Not having done much photography in the last two years I hadn't realised quite how out of practise I was. Soon got back into it though.

What's your strategy for editing big shoots after you've culled the stuff that's instantly not up to par?

Bash my head against the wall about 4 times, edit a 100, weepeat process

 

[smoke665]

Bash my head against the wall about 4 times, edit a 100, repeat process

And there's that also. LOL

 

[jcdeboever]

Bash my head against the wall about 4 times, edit a 100, repeat process

And there's that also. LOL

You know me, I hate to edit. I recently did a golf shoot. Never again OR at least in burst mode....wtf was I thinking. I am uploading 250 images as I type this. I took like 1200 in two days. It took me a month to get through them. Did I mention I hate to edit....

 

[petrochemist]

I generally have several attempts, but only a month ago when checking for shots to exhibit at our clubs show (this Saturday) I found there where still loads from the last year I hadn't looked at including the whole of the second day of last years air show!

 

[CherylL]

I cull the bad shots first off. Edit the better ones. I had a ton of photos from vacation and looking at them a month later I wasn't as attached. Then I was able to do serious culling.

 

[Derrel]

I have started using a system I call "the best", and "all the rest."

No ratings,no stars. Just process the very best few shots, and forget all the rest.

Life is too short to waste time on the B-list stuff.

I like to shoot Raw+JPEG.It is far quicker to do a slideshow of the straight-out-of-camera JPEG images than to do a batch conversion of raw files so that I have something to quickly go through

 

[smoke665]

@jcdeboever that's why I like Bridge first for culling. The almost instant full view look, makes for quick review. Once in Lr. I edit similar images in batches. By selecting the similar images i can edit one and use the Synch option to match the editing in the othe selections.

 

[Soocom1]

Throw it against the wall and see what sticks.

 

[weepete]

@weepete footnote: You may already be aware of this but when rating your images, especially on the initial ratings, I use either the shift>click or crtl>click to select batches of images. Once you have multiples selected, click on one image in the selection, then hit from 1-5 and it will assign the corresponding star rating to all the selected images. The same applies when deleting ratings.

Thanks mate, I do the shift select thing to create panoramas but never knew you could also do it with ratings!