{"id":2405,"date":"2012-03-11T10:24:02","date_gmt":"2012-03-11T18:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/?p=2405"},"modified":"2012-03-11T10:27:03","modified_gmt":"2012-03-11T18:27:03","slug":"lightroom-tutorial-diamonds-haystack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/2012\/03\/11\/lightroom-tutorial-diamonds-haystack\/","title":{"rendered":"Lightroom Tutorial – Diamonds in the Haystack"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a comment on a recent post on workflow.\u00a0 (Lightroom Tutorial \u2013 Workflow<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The question was if there was a way in Lightroom to sort through a large number of photographs to select the ones you want to work on.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the situation.\u00a0 You\u2019ve just returned from a five day workshop.\u00a0 And you have a thousand or so photographs.\u00a0 Now we know that not everyone of these images is a keeper.\u00a0 Personally, I\u2019m delighted if I get four or five keepers from a five day workshop.\u00a0 Hey, given the vagaries of weather and light, I\u2019m happy if I get one.<\/p>\n

But the prospect of sifting through hundreds and even thousands of images can be a bit overwhelming.\u00a0 So here\u2019s what I do.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Import<\/h1>\n

It all begins when I import the files to the computer.\u00a0 I won\u2019t go into the details of the Import dialog.\u00a0 The important thing is how the files are organized.\u00a0 I import my files into folders that are organized by year\/month\/day.\u00a0 Here\u2019s how that looks.<\/p>\n

\"input_folder_structure\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Note: I keep all of the folders under a \u201cStage\u201d folder.\u00a0 When I decide on the keepers I migrate them to a Portfolio folder structure (not seen here).<\/p>\n

Selection<\/h1>\n

The selection process starts in the Library module of Lightroom.<\/p>\n

\"library_mode\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is a screen capture of Lightroom in Library mode.\u00a0 I\u2019m displaying the Grid view (tap G).\u00a0 It\u2019s like a light box.\u00a0 To the left you can see the date folder structure where the files reside on the hard drive.<\/p>\n

The files in each folder are one day\u2019s worth of a seven day workshop along the Big Sur Coast of California.<\/p>\n

The selection process uses Lightroom\u2019s ability to rate photos with anywhere from 0 to 5 stars.\u00a0 All photos begin with 0 stars.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to make several passes through the photographs and give them stars.\u00a0 The first pass I\u2018ll assign one star to each photograph that is at all interesting.\u00a0 Each subsequent pass will become more selective.<\/p>\n

HDR<\/h3>\n

Before getting started I need to say a word about HDR or other techniques that result in multiple files.\u00a0 The selection process is complicated if you have, say, five HDR files for each shot.\u00a0 But Lightroom has a nice automatic stacking feature.<\/p>\n

In the menu under Photo | Stacking is an option called Auto-Stack by Capture Time\u2026.\u00a0 It allows you to stack files that were captured within a certain number of seconds.\u00a0 For example, I\u2019m stacking all files that were captured within 2 seconds of each other.\u00a0 In this folder there will be 40 stacks and 78 unstacked files.<\/p>\n

\"auto-stack\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After you click Stack, return to Photo | Stacking and click Collapse All Stacks.\u00a0 This will display just the first file in the stack.\u00a0 Now you\u2019re ready to start the selection process.<\/p>\n

Initial Selection by Day<\/h3>\n

I\u2019m going to make a first pass and every image that is at all interesting I\u2019ll give it 1 star by tapping the 1 key on the keyboard.\u00a0 On this first pass I\u2019ll also reject those files that I know I won\u2019t ever use for whatever reason \u2013 out of focus, lousy exposure, bad composition whatever.\u00a0 You do this by tapping the X key.\u00a0 So I have one finger on the 1 key and another on X.<\/p>\n

Now I switch to Loupe view by tapping E.\u00a0 Starting with the first image I\u2019ll use the right arrow key to step through each of the (stacked) files.\u00a0 If I like it even a little I tap the 1 key.\u00a0 If I hate it I tap the X key.\u00a0 If I\u2019m uncertain I don\u2019t tap any key and just move on to the next.\u00a0 If I have several shots of the same thing I don\u2019t obsess at this point about selecting the best one.\u00a0 For now I just select all that have potential.<\/p>\n

\"selection_loupe_view\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The film strip at the bottom shows you where you are.<\/p>\n

Oh, by the way, what about those files you rejected?\u00a0 In the menu go to Photo | Delete Rejected Photos\u2026.\u00a0 It will give you a warning of how many files you will be deleting.\u00a0 Click OK and they\u2019re gone.\u00a0 But be careful.\u00a0 They are permanently deleted from your hard drive, never to return again (unless you recover them right away from the recycle bin).<\/p>\n

Next Pass<\/h3>\n

This completes the initial pass.\u00a0 Each file you gave a rating of 1 has a single asterisk under the image in the Grid view.<\/p>\n

\"selection_1_star\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The next step is to filter the images to display just those that have one or more stars.\u00a0 You do that by clicking on the number of stars in the Filter area on the lower right.\u00a0 Now, you\u2019re looking at just those images that made it past the first selection round.<\/p>\n

\"selection_2_stars\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In this round you\u2019re going to assign 2 stars to the best of the lot.\u00a0 This is not the final selection but you are narrowing down the field.\u00a0 But where I\u2019ve selected several slightly different shots of the same subject I now try to choose the better one (or two).<\/p>\n

I usually make three passes for each daily folder, working up to three stars.\u00a0 You can narrow the field down quite a bit with three passes.<\/p>\n

Continue with Other Days in the Shoot<\/h3>\n

Because I\u2019m coming back from a multi-day shoot and each day\u2019s files are organized in separate folders by date, I need to repeat this selection process for each of the other days.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not any need to go beyond three stars at this stage of the game.\u00a0 We\u2019ll work down to the final selection in the last step.<\/p>\n

Final Selection<\/h3>\n

For the final selection we want to review all the photos that have been selected so far for the entire shoot.\u00a0 But how can this be done; they\u2019re all in different folders?\u00a0 Again, Lightroom has a solution for this.<\/p>\n

But before we get into this, remember those HDR files we stacked?\u00a0 When we rated one of them the only files that were rated with the first ones.\u00a0 The ones lower in the stack were not selected.\u00a0 So we need to go through, expand the stack and give the appropriate number of stars to each of the files in the stack.\u00a0 With that done we\u2019re ready to continue.<\/p>\n

To group all of the files from the shoot together in one place we create a Smart Collection.\u00a0 A smart collection gathers files based on some filtering criteria.\u00a0 The filters I\u2019ll use for this Smart Collection is a capture date between January 14 and 20 (the days of the shoot) and a Rating of 3 stars or greater.<\/p>\n

To create the Smart Collection click the + in the Collections group on the left and click Create Smart Collection\u2026.<\/p>\n

\"selection_collection\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the Create Smart Collection dialog, give the smart collection a name and add the filters.\u00a0 You can add more than one filter.<\/p>\n

\"smart_collection_dialog\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I created two filters for this Smart Collection \u2013 the first looking for files with a rating of 3 stars or better and the second looking for files with a capture date between the two dates I mentioned above.\u00a0 Click Create when you\u2019re done.\u00a0 All of the images from all of the files in the date range that have a rating of three stars or greater are added to the collection.<\/p>\n

Now you can review all of the images from the entire shoot.\u00a0 Make two more passes \u2013 a 4 star pass and a final 5 star pass.\u00a0 By the time I get to the last pass I\u2019ve usually narrowed the entire shoot down to the best four or five images, maybe fewer.<\/p>\n

This process can go very quickly and can usually be completed in the course of an evening.\u00a0 There\u2019s one variation on this process I should mention.\u00a0 I usually can\u2019t see the full potential of an unprocessed RAW image.\u00a0 So if I think an image might work out but I\u2019m not sure, I\u2019ll take a minute or so during the selection process to apply a few simple Lightroom adjustments.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t take long.\u00a0 I used a lite version of my workflow.\u00a0 See Lightroom Tutorial – Workflow<\/a><\/p>\n

So that\u2019s it.\u00a0 Give it a try.\u00a0 I hope this works for you as well as it works for me.<\/p>\n

If you find this post beneficial please LIKE it.\u00a0 If you know of someone who might find this post helpful please feel free to share it.\u00a0 Links for both are at the top of the post.\u00a0 Also, you are encouraged to join the conversation and leave a comment.<\/p>\n

We do photography workshops.\u00a0 Come on out and join us.\u00a0 Click here to check us out.<\/a><\/p>\n

You can also check out our photography.\u00a0 Click here.<\/a><\/p>\n

(2033)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So you’ve come back from a shoot with hundreds of not thousands of files. How do you find the diamonds in such a large haystack?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,273],"tags":[58,379,76,376,47,13,381,48,377,380,375,378],"class_list":["post-2405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-to-articles","category-lightroom-how-to-articles-articles","tag-adobe","tag-filters","tag-fine-art-photography","tag-images","tag-lightroom","tag-photography","tag-photogrpahy-workhsops","tag-photoshop","tag-rating","tag-reject","tag-selection","tag-smart-collections"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Nl7-CN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2405"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2407,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions\/2407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}