What Are Your Processing Steps

Scootersbabygirl

I have this feeling that I'm making things harder on myself in the way I process, and that I'm not using Bridge to it's fullest potential. What are your processing steps in regards to culling out bad shots?

0scar99

I used to use bridge but have moved to Lightroom3 because the workflow is awesome. Load the photos hit caps-lock press P for a pick and X for a reject. Auto jumps to next image. First pass done in no time.. Loads of other awesome features. Recommended!

ShepsMom

Everything i do is pretty much in LR, i only open photoshop for special touches.

Bryans12v

Im with Oscar. I dont use bridge either and use Lr3. I create a collection, upload to it and then rate all photos with the "star" ratings. This way not only do I get to sift through images for the round file, I also get to grade them all. Then, I edit by rating. I start with 5 stars and work my way down to one.

It may not be the best way but it def works great for me.

Matthew Saville

Bridge works great if you have a moderately small workload. If you process more than a couple thousand images per week, however, I can honestly say that you need to use Lightroom 3 or you are wasting a few hours per week.

I've used Bridge ever since it first came out with Photoshop CS or CS2, whatever it was. I've used Lightroom since the very first beta version. I process about ten thousand images per week as part of a team of wedding photographes, handling about 100 weddings per year. So, trust me when I say that Lightroom is simply the best tool for a high volume workflow. Aperture comes close, and is probably just about as fast if you're really good, but on average Lightroom takes the cake or speed.

However, In my general workflow I still use Bridge every day for various sorting / archival / browsing purposes, and for smaller jobs. It is still quite a powerful tool and like I said, if your workflow load is moderate or minimal, it would probably be more trouble than it's worth to switch. Especially mid-season.

The way I sort my images is, I cull "in", not "out". Select the keepers, instead of selecting rejects. It's fewer clicks, unless you keep more than 50% of your images.

For Lightroom, I use the flagged / unflagged / reject label as the foremost label, because I can cull very quickly using the left and right arrows to navigate, and ctrl-up or ctrl-down (arrows) to increase or decrease the label. Then when I'm done culling the "picks", I filter and flag all the un-picked photos as rejects, and move them to a separate folder for easy deletion later during the archival process.

For Bridge, since there isn't a "pick" label and just colors / stars, you can use either one. Personally, I prefer to use color labels because you can label and un-label an image just by hitting the button once. In Bridge's preferences I set it so that I don't have to hit ctrl+6 to designate a red label for example, I can just hit 6 and that's it. For me, the numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9 (red, yellow, green, blue) are named "un-edited, edited, outputted, uploaded." So I start by going through the photos and labeling the "keepers" as red. Then as I open them in ACR and process them, I label them yellow if for any reason I am not able to do the entire job in one sitting and need to "remember my place". Then when I've got everything edited and outputted as JPG's, the RAW files get labeled green. Then after the job is uploaded, I label the RAW files blue.

Then also, while editing, I use a star ranking (usually just 5 stars or zero stars) to designate the special images that might be used for blogging and/or slideshows, or my primary portfolio etc...

It's a bit over the top, especially towards the end, and if you'd like you can simply use one label to designate "picks", and another label to designate a special few.

Bottom line- in Bridge and / or Lightroom, you should be able to cull over a thousand images per hour. In Lightroom, you should be able to cull AND color correct images at a rate of about 200-600 images per hour.


A few tips on how NOT to cull images, in my experience:

Don't bother applying a label to 100% of the images and then reducing / removing the label to designate a reject photo. I used that method for a bit when I was still figuring things out, and it's not as fast as simply opening the photos and selecting the keepers right away.

Unless you have an insanely fast computer, don't use Bridge to confirm 100% focus. The loupe tool really only works efficiently on a really high-powered machine.

In Lightroom, similarly, if you want to quickly confirm 100% focus you should generate 1:1 previews. However, on a slower computer, this could take all day for a 2-3K image wedding job, shooting 12-21 megapixel RAW's. So again, an insanely fast computer is required to generate and view 1:1 previews efficiently.

On a moderate or slow computer, I can HIGHLY recommend Nikon View NX 2 for Nikon users, or Photomechanic for Canon users. (Yes, Canon has their own DPP program and "Zoom browser", but it's terrible compared to Nikon View NX and Photomechanic.) View NX 2 and Photomechanic run off the preview thumbnails of a RAW image, and are basically bare-bones culling programs that do very little editing. However, they are INSANELY fast at simply scrolling through images, and even loading 100% previews, on even a moderately spec'd computer. (My old macbook had a 2 GHZ core duo, and just 2 GB of RAM, and Nikon View NX was by far the fastest culling program.)

Photomechanic has issues with translating the labels / flags into Lightroom and/or Bridge, so if you use Photomechanic to cull then you should also use Photomechanic to separate the "rejects" into a separate folder. Nikon View NX 2, on the other hand, allows you to recognize both color labels and star rankings in Bridge and Lightroom.

I hope this helps your workflow speed! I used to teach a "workflowshop" locally around Southern California, but it ended up being TOO geeky for most students and I've decided to just keep my nose to the grindstone for now. :-)

=Matt=

Art Scott

first round of sorting is done with windows Viewer.....there is MS download so you can now look at RAWS (for most cams) and DNG's...this way I can enlarge them to see what it looks like big.....keep or delete......convert to DNG......(hoping Nikon gets smarter and gives us the option to shoot in DNG real soon) ...then it is into lightroom for everything else, unless I just have to go into Photoshop for some pixel editing I am usually done in LR......

joshtilton

The best piece of software you can have when working with a lot of RAW files is not Lightroom or Bridge. PhotoMechanic is simply amazing how fast it renders RAW files.

I ingest my CF cards with PhotoMechanic and then I cull everything. There is virtually no wait between files, so you can cull a shoot very, very fast. I will then only make adjustments to the files that I picked. I use to load those files in Lightroom, but after realizing I was only making small adjustments to my images, I decided to just go back to using Bridge.

Whatever you use to process your RAW files, PhotoMechanic will save you TONS of time!

r3t1awr3yd

There's a windows 7 update to view RAW files in explorer... so I just roll through the pics like I would any ol' files. I like writing so I write down the one's I like and what (if any) special ways I'd like to process them and then only import the one's I like into LR/PS CS3. Probably a little inefficient especially after reading about some of these shortcut keys in LR lol.

zoomer

I am going to look into Photomechanic also....people who use it rave about it.
Lightroom 3 is so much slower for me than 2.7 was...really killing me.

Sam

zoomer wrote: »

I am going to look into Photomechanic also....people who use it rave about it.
Lightroom 3 is so much slower for me than 2.7 was...really killing me.

Zoomer,

I have seen you post this before, but I don't see it on my computer. I wonder if there isn't a setting that's out of wack?

Sam