A friend and fellow photographer Rhonda Dixon clued me in to a free webinar being offered by Photographer's Edit, an online image editing service. Their objective was to show how they work through images and how they are able to quickly and efficiently process a large number of images.
Here are the main points I took from the series.
Cut Down On Ratings
I've heard this point made before but was bad at implementing it. I used 2,3,4 and 5 stars all to mean different things. The process of culling images and setting all those ratings usually means that I analyze every image 3-4 times. For a shoot of 300+ images that can easily mean several hours just to rate images.
Photographer's Edit suggested (as others have) to just have a pass/fail system with the belief that you either want to use a picture or you don't and there is no middle ground.
While I still like the idea of flagging my very best shots I think now that I can do that better with a color assignment as an indicator instead of a star rating. Having applied this process to a few small shoots has indeed made life easier. Only time will tell if I come to regret not having the ratings, but I think I'll be fine without it and will enjoy the extra time I gain because of it.
Shoot Better Shots
This is one of those tips that makes you say..."Well Duh!", but it is the truth. The more time you spend on getting the right shots, the less time you'll spend having to clean them up later.
Not the term 'better' means a few things here. The first and most obvious is to remove any negative aspects in your shot before you take it. If you can remove an artifact before pressing the shutter you won't have to photoshop it out later.
Secondly, compose your shot and take it fewer times. If you're just firing away, you're going to have a ton of images that are all similar to work through and I know I personally will debate which of two similar photos to use.
Lastly, get your settings close to ideal and try to maintain it. That will allow the post-processing work to be more easily copy-pasted between images and will reduce the need to do image-by-image adjustments.
Set Initial Preview to 1:1
This was probably the best thing I took away from the webinar. When you import images there are options for what preview size should be created for each image. A large preview will cost you more storage space on your computer but a small preview will cost you time every time you view a shot later.
Lately lightroom had been very slow for me and every image took forever to pull up. This was because all my imports had a 'minimal' preview-image set. Every time I pulled up an image to view or to edit the computer had to reprocess the RAW file. If it was so slow with 8MP images from my 30D how much worse would it be to work with 5D MK ii images?
Now this will cause your import to be slower, so remember to consider that if you're just trying to get images into lighroom quickly. If you have more time though then generate the larger preview at import (for me it is 1 minute per 25 images) and it will make working with the files later much less painful. Because of this discovery I believe that I'll be able to avoid my perceived need to buy a new computer for the 5D mk ii.
Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
The time savings that was quoted on the webinar was 20-30% time savings by using the shortcuts instead of moving around with the mouse. I know this to be true from my programming background and already know some shortcuts for Lightroom, but this is just more confirmation that I need to learn more. Here is a good shortcut list from Adobe http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/keyboard_shortcuts.html
conclusion
That's about it from me. I want to thank Photographer's Edit for their willingness to share their knowledge with the photography community. And I hope that everyone reading this now has something to consider and that they can save a little of their time.
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Thanks for the extremely kind post Adam! I'm glad that Photographer's Edit was able to help, and please let us know if there is ever anything else we can do!
