Editing – sorting the wheat from the chaff

If I am shooting fixed subjects like landscapes or buildings then is likely to only be a few shots of each scene. When shooting wildlife or people then I can end up with a thousand or more images to have to sort through.Lightroom editing

Well the first job is to get those image on to internal hard disk of my computer. I then import and copy them into the local Lightroom. The import also copied the files to an external disk. Once the majority of the editing is complete the Lightroom files get moved to external disk. By this time Apple’s time machine will also have a copy on its disk so I’ll havE several copies before the memory cards get wiped and I also clear down the local hard disk for the next set of images.

Something to remember with Adobe Lightroom V5 is that you can create something called a smart preview. This enables you to edit and image but not actually have the image with you, great for when your out and a about but wanting to get some work done on an old MacBook Air with only a small SSD inside.

So you now have a thousand or so images sat in Lightroom, how do you quickly find the great ones. Well there are several ways but I find it a lot easier if I use two monitors, one set to grid view and the other set to loupe.  This enables you to flick through the your images in grid view but evaluate them properly.

I also tend to group similar photographs together, you can then just pick a couple of good ones that ones that are very similar.

I also find its good to do an edit close to taking the photographs but also go back over your old work and look again at the ones you did not select.  To often you can chose photographs because of the amount of effort it took to capture and not based on the content.  Time can be a good equaliser.

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