Lightroom calls this ability to group virtual images together “Collections.” The advantage of a catalog is that you only need one original. Here’s the folder with my favorite 56 photos from the Canadian Rockies photo trip I recently led.Ĭatalog. I do everything date based, starting with the year, making it easy to sort and find chronologically. Each trip I take, or workshop I lead, results in a folder of my favorite images. And once again, how you do this will depend on whether you use a catalog system or folder-based (like with Photo Mechanic or Bridge). So easy access to smaller sets, or collections of images, is important. Obviously, any time you need to find one of your best photos, you don’t want to search the entire archive. The image marked yellow was one I chose to edit, the red one is the version after being edited and saved as a DNG file, and what I used to generate a lower-rez version with PM to share on Instagram. Here’s a contact sheet (in Photo Mechanic) from some bird photography I did earlier this week. In that case, for me, it makes sense to save those “Master” files back into the folder with the RAW or JPEG originals. If you use a folder-based workflow (like I do), then those best images should be saved as PSD or DNG files. If using a catalog program, then you should have a way of marking your very best images (color or number rating) so they can be easily searched for and found. All of those mean that whatever you’ve done can be undone easily, allowing you to go backwards or forwards without starting all over again, from that “Master” file. That could be through a catalog program (like Lightroom or Mylio), where the edits are virtual, or saved with Layers or as a DNG file (with more traditional editing programs, like Photoshop or Adobe Camera Raw). The goal here is to always work on your images non-destructively, meaning the original pixels remain untouched. Going through 1000 images takes me less than an hour. That means that on most shoots, I end up keeping about 25% of what I shot. #Apply in copyright photo mechanic software#Once I’ve marked them, I tell the software to select the photos I didn’t mark (“Untagged,” in Photo Mechanic terms) and delete them. I’m overly generous doing that, not looking at images critically and marking any image I may have a possible use for (I shoot a lot of “before” and “after” photos for teaching). But as I do that, I mark them (“tag,” “flag,” whatever your software calls it). Now, after downloading, I still go through and look for my best photos. Shooting RAW, each time I pressed the shutter button I was creating a file around 50MB in size… which made me change my tune and flipped that part of my workflow upside down. Then I got my first truly high-resolution camera, a Nikon D800 (36 megapixels). Download, find your best photos, work them up and move on. In the early days of teaching workflow, one of the things I always preached was, “Why waste time looking for bad photos?” That meant storage was cheap, so don’t spend time looking for photos to delete. #Apply in copyright photo mechanic download#Click the link in the text above to go to the download location for it. #Apply in copyright photo mechanic how to#This is the PDF I’ve written explaining how to automate the process using Photo Mechanic, Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Bridge. It covers everything from folder structure to captions and renaming (which is critical). For years now I’ve posted a PDF on my website titled “ Automating Digital Downloads” that explains, step-by-step, how to accomplish this with Photo Mechanic (my favorite), Lightroom and Adobe Bridge. If your workflow has you plugging the card in, creating a folder on the computer, and dragging the images to it, you’re not just wasting time, you’re making every step after that more difficult. In addition to this class in Mexico City, I also ran sessions in Bangkok, Delhi, Tokyo and Lima, Peru. In 2007 I was hired by the Associated Press to lead workflow classes for their photographers at different locations around the world. My attitude was that with computers and the right software, photographers should be able to handle more photos more quickly than ever before. And again, gear was the easy part, workflow the challenge. Over the next half-dozen years, as I left my paper and began a freelance career, I carved out a niche in helping other newspapers make the transition to digital. It was the workflow - downloading, organizing, renaming, adding valuable information to the photos (names, locations, etc.), and then being able to find the images - that was the hard part. I quickly learned that the gear was the easy part. By the spring of 1997, I’d been tasked with helping convert the entire department to digital. I started shooting digital for my newspaper in the fall of 1996.
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