Photographic magic

[mattbell]

Thanks for your suggestions on photo processing programs.  I ended up going with Adobe Lightroom 2.

After a friday-night binge with the software, in which I culled through, tagged, described, and refined about 800 photos in about 5 hours, I can say that it's totally addictive.  The "develop" feature is amazing.  I can take shitty pictures of interesting things I took under less than ideal conditions and refine the hell out of them until they're quite good.  If they're good to begin with, you can make them really sizzle. 

You have to be careful with focus though or you'll start to feel like an overworked superhero, surrounded by a massive crowd full of people whose lives need saving.  I'm trying to focus my retouching efforts on the photos that get me the most value for doing so.   Otherwise I'll never get through.

5 hours * 11000 photos / 800 photos = 68.75 hours, which sounds like an extremely long time to be in front of the computer.  Hopefully once I'm more proficient with the program, it will go significantly faster.

Comments

[sol3.livejournal.com]

Everyone develops their own workflow with lightroom - but I figured i'd pass along what I do with it. Before I even think about editing, I do a couple passes of culling - my thought being "Sure, i may be able to edit a photo into a really good shot - but if I have another shot that's already really good of $(PERSON|PLACE|THING), is it worth the effort?".

Go into full-fullscreen mode, Shift-tab to close off all the tool bars, select the first photo, hit L twice to black out the screen - then I make multiple passes. For the first pass, I look at an image, if it passes this round, i hit 1 (giving it a rating of one) and then right arrow to the next image. Once I get through all the images, I look at the count of images I have left, if it still seems high, then I repeat, this time rating the keepers to 2.

I got into this when I was doing night club shooting, and would shoot between 500-1500 shots in a night, and have to upload 50-75 by morning. It became a really quick way to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

Shots that were less than stellar, but which I only had one of, and thought I might be able to rescue with editing would also end up getting selected this way, so I wouldn't completely throw the others out.

[crotchgoblin.livejournal.com]

:)