Hello,
I recently started a new practice when editing in Lightroom (which I havent determined is good or bad yet). When I import them all, I just import into lightroom, then go through each photo first only rejecting. After that I will delete all rejected ones (note that a reject is either totally bad timing, composition, lighting, or (eek!) all of the above. Next I will go through and flag the best ones, the ones that I know are awesome (at least by my standards). (Having ADHD is good here, because I will only physically be able to edit the photos I am already in love with, so I rarely try to "rescue" a photo) I then edit them all, and export into one massive "EDITED PHOTOS" folder, with subfolders inside it.
This system clearly is not perfect, especially in importing, storing, managing, and maybe deleting photos? But I am not sure how to better organize or label, adjust metadata such as keywords effectively without doing it only after the fact in Bridge. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thank you,
Tyler
I think where this thread will end up is "it's up to you," but I use the same system, more or less, and have read of a lot of people doing the same. Differences may lie in whether people use flags or stars or whatnot, but I think your overall system is pretty widely used.
As far as selects, I do a couple rounds of culling. First is 1star to anything that catches my eye in the first couple seconds, second is go through the 1stars and start to delve into the details and pick out which ones are the best of those and bump them up to 2stars, third round i do the same thing and *really* get picky and make them 3stars. For how I shoot now on an average model/shoot, if I've got more than like 10-15 3stars at the end I kinda know I haven't been picky enough. And really, at this point really only 2-4 of those shots ever see the light of day in the end anyway. If it's street/travel then I just know I need to be aware of what's really 'good' or not, I'm probably even stingier with my 3stars. I also don't delete bad shots unless they're complete throwaways like a flash not firing, the first handful of lighting tests, or shots of my floor on accident.
Organization is also pretty subjective, I'm still organizing chronologically but some people use categories. My folders are dated with a word at the end (model's name, or location if it was street/travel etc), and basically everything from the SD card at the time goes into that folder (and then I clear the card). I don't use any actual software keywords. My filenames are all unique in that they have the filename from inside the camera plus a date/time stamped (down to the second) in on import by Lightroom. My thought is if I just had a pile of my files and no software, I'd still be able to more or less piece to together just by looking at the filenames. Maybe not what's been shot, but what belongs together.
But again, it's up to you :)
Thanks for your input! I think I'm going to reorganize just my edited photos folders to classify them better. One more question: do you delete images after you have edited a couple of them from the batch or do you let them sit on the disk? Oh, and i lied a bit about it being the one more question. Do you do multiple exports such as with and without watermark or different sizes or sharpened for screen or not? Just curious how you organize those if you do
If you mean delete the ones I haven't touched because I picked others, nah I don't delete those.
And I pretty much only export full jpgs and then smaller files for web/social media and so far I just let lightroom add a "-2" to the smaller files (Hit 'use unique names' when it recognizes duplicates in the folder it wants to export to). Good enough for me for now.
Personally I find the best system is to do your 1st edit (only taking out completely unusable images) by rating them with 1 star, and then 2nd edit with 2 stars etc. and keep going up until 5. Of course as you go through even the first edit you know a particular shot will be a winner so I give it 5 stars at that point anyway.
Once I have done my edits I do create collections (not smart collections) with my 1st, 2nd edits etc, purely because it is so easy to bump a number key and change the rating on an image (especially in the develop module when typing in values).
I never ever delete photos, seems to be an unnecessary work to me.
Thanks! How do you create a catalog after the fact?
I assume you mean collection? If you filter your view so that you are only displaying 1 stars (or 5 stars etc.), then select all the images (ctrl + a) and click on the '+' symbol and select - 'create collection' under 'collections' (Left side of the library module). Then just type in your name and check 'include selected photos'. Or if you already have made a collection, you can drag individual or selected photos directly into the collection
You assumed correctly haha! Thanks so much, I will have to try working with this more.