Photographers: Save Hours In Post-Production By Using Ratings And Rejections In Lightroom

Gerard Murphy - February 28, 2012 | Archiving, Digital Asset Management, Lightroom, Photographers, Uncategorized

At Mosaic, we spend hours a day speaking with photographers. We often hear that photographers wished they spent less time in post-production. As modern photographers we just take a lot of photos. While our goal is to take fewer but make more impactful photos, we still need to spend a lot of time finding the best photos to selectively show our clients or to show our friends. We are the curator of our own photos.

Digital Asset Management – DAM – refers to your whole workflow from before the shot to the archival of your photo. One of the important aspects of this process is to catalog images. This is a give and take. You have to invest some time upfront so that your editing and searching process later is easier in the long run.

Metadata

I never metadata I didn’t like…Corny jokes aside, adding metadata like keywords, flags, ratings and stars can add value to your photos while saving you time. What we typically hear is that people don’t use metadata, because it takes too much time. Using this method, you can spend less time and get more value from your cataloging workflow.

Rate and Cull

You only want to spend time developing and editing your best photos. You don’t want to edit every photo. But there are also photos we don’t want to delete.

As I import photos into Lightroom, I add keywords to the whole shoot. Maybe this is the destination (Spain), client names, location (studio, park, church,), style (portraits, boudoir, etc.) or holiday (Christmas). This takes almost no time and makes it easy to find photos later.

After I import my photos into Lightroom, I take a quick glance through the import in the library mode. I then rate every photo. That is right… every photo. I know this sounds like a lot of work, but Lightroom makes it easy to go through many photos quickly. I also selectively delete my photos. I don’t delete very much, but if the photo is just not very good or out of focus or a rapid fire shot where I have 7 similar photos, I will delete.