Pixiq

Lightroom’s raison d’etre is editing and processing images quickly and easily. It does this in my experience much faster and more painlessly than any other photo software I have ever used.

To start off with I’ll give you some background. In my old workflow, using Photoshop, Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) – back in the day – the only way to really see if an image was sharp or not was to open it up in Photoshop, or for raw images, in ACR. I have to say that workflow was a nightmare whether you had to edit a few hundred or a few thousand images. It took forever to edit my images. And it literally took days if I really wanted to go in and see which images were critically sharp. Then Lightroom came along and I immediately figured out that this would be the way of the future in terms of editing my work – and really, in terms of speeding up my workflow.

If you have not tried Lightroom, I implore you to give it a whirl. I am not a paid employee of Lightroom – though I did shoot demo images of mountain bikers for Lightroom and these are on the Adobe Lightroom website as well as in the packaging that comes with Lightroom. You can check out a sample gallery of my selects from that shoot on my website here.

By using Lightroom as the heart of my workflow, I now spend probably one-tenth the time I did with my previous workflow. So give it a try – I don’t think you’ll regret it. And if you feel like you need some help to get your workflow started skip down to the end of this blog post and check out the links to my complete workflow. I have written an e-Books that contains my entire workflow, which is available for purchase from the links below and it has received rave reviews.

Now, let’s get down to business. You already have your images imported into Lightroom. You have added a decent amount of the metadata – or at least the basics: name, contact info, copyright info, basic keywords, location, etc. And maybe if all of your images are of the same subject you entered all of the metadata into the images as they were imported. If so, then you are done which is nice because adding metadata isn’t much fun but it is very important. If you haven’t gotten all of the metadata in there then this is the time to do so – just type in the pertinent metadata and off you go. You can add the metadata for one image, then sync all the similar images by selecting the images you want to sync and clicking on the “Sync Metadata” button at the bottom of the right hand panel. Very easy and this really speeds up the metadata insertion process – sounds like we are performing some type of scary surgery but it isn’t that painful.

I normally get back into the office, download and import the images, add metadata then take a short break before the editing process begins. I would recommend that you edit your images in a series of steps unless you are under the gun and you have to get a few images out immediately. The reason for this is we need a logical process and one that allows us to spend enough time with the images to really select the superstar images.

So, for my editing process I usually go through and rank images while at the same time checking sharp­ness. Lightroom can drastically speed up the editing process compared to ACR and Bridge because with the click of a mouse I can go to a 1:1 preview of any image. I normally go through images one by one with the Filmstrip visible and all of the other panels moved out of the way – hence I get the biggest preview possible. Scrolling through the images is as simple as hitting the right arrow key and tapping the number keys from 1 to 5 to rank the image with stars. You can compare any number of images just by selecting more than one image. To zoom into any image to check sharpness just click on it. To rotate an image use the rotate icons in the lower left in the tool bar below the image window or select a group of images and use the arrows just under any image.

So as you can see it doesn’t take long to zip through all of your images, rank them and check for sharpness. If you chose “Render 1:1 Previews” when you imported the images Lightroom should move very quickly even with the 100% previews. A wicked fast computer is a key part of any workflow. Lightroom will work on just about any computer but if you are on an older computer it might run so slowly that workflow might not flow so well. Also of note, Lightroom is a RAM hog so if you don’t have much RAM installed in your computer you might think about buying some more – 4 to 9 GB of RAM is not too much.

My process of editing is to go through an entire shoot as I have outlined above in multiple steps. My first round of editing is a gut reaction to the images. I’ll give any image I think worthy of consideration a 1 star rating on the first pass. If I run into images that are out of focus or have technical issues I’ll hit the “X” key and mark them as rejects which will be deleted later. Once I have gone through the entire shoot and given the selects a one star I’ll filter my shoot for those 1-star images and repeat this process upgrading the deserving images to 2-stars and so on. I use a star rating system because it affords more flexibility than using the flags or colors. And it lends itself nicely to the editing process I outline here.

Normally, I will continue this culling process until at least 3 stars or until I feel like I have group of images I really need to process. In the 2-star round of editing I will start to give four and five star ratings to images that I am sure will be the AAA selects. I don’t really have any special meaning for the different numbers I rate with but in general a 5-star image is rare and these images almost always end up in my portfolio.

While editing I tend to use the Compare View as above. In this mode you can bring up two images and compare them for composition and at 100% for sharpness and detail. I won’t go into detail on how this mode works since playing with it for a few minutes will explain everything. But the best part of this mode is it really allows you to look at your images critically and determine which of your two or three star images are the real winners.

I heartily recommend that you take a break between rounds of editing. This will help you keep your sanity and give your eyes a break plus the more time you spend editing the better your edits. Photographers are not necessarily the best editors of their work. We get emotionally attached to images because of the situation, subject or some nostalgic experience we had while capturing an image. Be viscious while editing, look at your images with fresh eyes and judge them for what they are, not by what was happening when you shot the image.

To delete my “rejected” images, I filter for the rejects which is the flag with the “X” in it, then select all the images and hit delete. Lightroom has a series of steps one has to go through to delete images (which is good so you don’t accidentally delete images) so I use the reject flag to mark those images I want to delete. This way I don’t have to go through all the delete protocols on each image.

Once I have my images culled to the best of the best, I move onto the processing phase of my workflow which can take some serious time. I have found that images need a lot more attention than most people realize to really dial in the colors so an image will print nicely – especially if it is going to be printed in CMYK for editorial clients. If you are working in a studio and have your camera settings, white balance and exposure dialed in then you might not need to spend much time processing your images and that is how it should be to keep your workflow efficient.

Because I want all of my images to look their best I try to get my selects down to a manageable number of images. For some long trips, where I have shot 3,000 to 10,000 images it is never going to be a manageable number so I just have to figure I’ll be in front of the computer for a while dealing with those images. All just part of the job, but thankfully with Lightroom if I am diligent in the field and have access to electricity I can at least start importing and adding metadata to images on my laptop so that half the battle is over when I get back into the office. For those of you in a studio shooting portraits the editing might be done for you by the client and Lightroom is a great tool for letting your clients view the images.

If you are interested in developing a complete workflow of your own using Lightroom, I would recommend checking out my Lightroom Workflow e-book Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographers Workflow. You can purchase that eBook for the low price of 24.95 on my website.

This e-book presents a complete workflow which includes my in-camera settings, how to determining the optimum white balance and exposure, color management, working with Lightroom, web galleries, Noise Ninja and much, much more. A sample table of contents is available for download on my website if you want to see exactly what is covered. The e-books is also up to date and covers the latest version of Lightroom and Photoshop.