Lightroom Photos - Culling Your Images

G-Slev

G-Slev

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467
Name
Gary
Edit My Images
Yes
Like many motorsport photographers, I am finding that I return from an event - particularly the major events, like this weekend gone's WEC - with literally thousands of images. I don't seem to be getting the culling bit of my workflow correct, as I always seem to end up with too many images once I have been through them to process.

I was wondering what workflow you all use to go through your images and decide which ones to keep and which to bin before you start? I tend to look at sharpness in the first instance, as well as how the car is framed, but I suspect I just need to be more brutal when deciding which images to delete when I start out.

I am interested to hear what workflow you all use to cull your motorsport images, and what criteria you apply when deciding which images to keep.
 
I assume you're not doing this commercially so these are just for you? If so, I'm in the same boat. My process is something like this:

Take few hundred photos at an event.
Import and cull probably half of them leaving ones that are technically okay (using 'x' reject thingy)
Cull another half again or more to get rid of stuff that is samey or boring - probably end up with 100 or so images
A few months later, realise I only really want to keep special images and end up keeping maybe only 10-20
It's pretty brutal but I've come to realise lately that my catalogue is stuffed full of samey, technically sound images that mean nothing to me. I'm trying to whittle it right down to only photos that interest me or my family.
I've started embarking on a cull of 25k of images that go right back 10 years or so. I suspect I'll end up with fewer than 10k when all is done and dusted, hopefully fewer but I'm hoping they'll all mean something to someone.
 
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Hi Gary,

Don't do motorsport, but I do quite a few portraits... Here's my process :

1. Set up 2 filters. One to hide rejected photos from the library and one to show only rejected photos in the library. Set the filter to "Hide rejected"
fjELhbm.jpg

2. Go through each of your images individually in Loupe Mode (quickly) checking for & rejecting (press X) obviously blurred shots or terrible compositions (i.e. Things I Tried That Didn't Work). As you press X, the photo should disappear.
3. Back to Grid mode. TAB to remove the end panels (TAB again will bring them back), and also remove the top panel. Leave the filmstrip.

4. You're likely to have photos of the same style close together. Start to group your photos. Shift/Ctrl+Click a group of similar images and press "N" to go to Survey mode. This will give you a nice big bit of screen space to look at them. Select & press X on the keyboard to reject the duffers. Press the little cross to remove the photo from Survey but keep it in your library. Start with the most obvious photos and whittle things down. You'll see that as you reject/keep the obvious photos, the less obvious will grow and fill the space. Once you've done a group, press "G" to go back to grid mode and select another similar bunch.
A2HATDX.jpg


As to "which to keep". What do you do with your photos? Are you making a book? Selling them? Putting them on Facebook? Instagram? How many do you need from each shoot/session?

The portraits I do for my wife end up on Instagram and she likes 10 photos for each makeup "look". I keep one shot of each similarly composed image. Looking at my example above (counting L-R, I'd pick one from 3 & 4, one from 6 & 7, one from 8, 9 & 10, and one from 11 & 12) because they're similar. I'd probably end up deleting 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 & 11.

I don't do motorsport, but just briefly looking through your Flickr, I see a green post that's popped up in a few images obscuring your cars. I'd get rid of those. Ones where you haven't got the whole car - get rid. If you've got 20 photos of different cars coming round the same bend - group them all together and put them in Survey mode (shift click them all in the Library mode then press "N") and whittle down to 10% of what you started with (from 10, pick 1). If 10% is just too harsh, do 20% (keep 1 in 5). However if you're selling photos of drivers, you need to keep one of each driver coming round the same bend. But as a spectator, this doesn't make for an interesting image feed.

Once you've finished, deal with the photos you rejected. I delete mine from disk, but if you're not confident, you can just remove them from the library and keep them on disk. (Use the filter to show "rejected photos only", shift+click to select them all then delete!)

Self-critique is a good skill to have. If you feel you're weak at it, you need to find someone who will help. Contact Sheets were how we did it in the olden days, and Survey Mode is Lightroom's answer to it. But there's nothing stopping you printing out a contact sheet, or making a jpeg of it and putting it up somewhere for people to pass opinions. Finally, if you critique others' work, this will also improve your own ability to self-crit. Magnum's "Contact Sheets" book is a fab resource too for seeing how professional photographers whittle down a roll of film to 1 or 2 exposures that they kept.

Hope this helps. Probably went on far too long for someone who knows nothing about motorsport! But Survey mode in Lightroom is awesome and makes culling a doddle.
 
My workflow is this:

Import stage: Add to collection with my 2018 collection set titled with the name of the event, apply keywords and my basic develop preset, create previews, smart previews, sync with Lightroom mobile. Leave the laptop for a bit while all this happens.

Once everything is imported, I just go through the collection one by one. Any that need a bit of cropping or further tweaking I make the adjustments. Any images that I don't want I just press X to reject and move on. Once I've gone through every image I go back, select all the rejected photos and delete them. I never saw the point in going through every image once to cull all your rejects, and then going right back to the beginning to process the ones that are left, I just do it all in one process.
 
RichardC27 said:
I never saw the point in going through every image once to cull all your rejects, and then going right back to the beginning to process the ones that are left, I just do it all in one process.
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For me, the first cut is fast. Blurred or generally bad? Bye bye. The second cut is more considered & measured. I suspect it might depend on the style of photography. Landscapes are quite easy to discard/keep. Portraits less so and documentary can take a long while as I often need to keep going back to them. Anything else? Dunno...
 
I don't use LR but do do a bit of motorsport machine gunning so sometimes need to do a fair bit of culling!

My method is as below...

Copy entire card(s) to a folder then make a second copy and call that "Originals". (This Originals folder never gets touched.)
Using Windows built in Pictures Viewer, I scroll through quickly and dispose of any horrors (OOF, badly framed, crap panning etc..)
After a day or 2, I revisit this first cull and go through being even more selective. Once I have a large selection of culled shots, I save this as another folder called "First Cull" which again stays untouched, making another copy to use as a working folder.
When I can face doing a further cull, I go through and select the best to print, doing further cropping as necessary.
 
I do something similar to Nod except I don't make a second "Originals" copy, I just copy my culled folder a few times.

Once I have got rid of the dross, I then import into LR, do all my work then export to a modded folder in all the rest of my folder copies.

Only once I have multiple copies of everything, do I format the CF card.
 
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At the end of a race meeting, I've usually got around 1500 images ( raw files)
Once imported into LR , I run through each image, grading them
Usually 3,4,and 5. As I usually shoot in manual, and often fail to spot slight changes in the ambient light ( cloud passing over, or a break in the cloud)
3, for under exposed, 4 for over exposed, and 5 for correct exposure, and 0 for the oof, and poorly framed images.
I'll then filter the 3's bring up the exposure on the 1st image, and sync it across all the 3's. Doing the same process with the 4's , bringing down the exposure.
Once complete, I'll export the finished images as JPG's and upload to the club's trackside gallery for riders to buy images.
From those I select 9 or 10 images that get sent of with the race reports, to the press.
 
Personally I do the first cull before importing to Lightroom - get the shots off the card onto the computer then just use Windows image viewer app and scroll through them and just delete anything unusable for whatever reason. I remember reading something a while back that said it was much better for the health of the Lightroom catalog to avoid importing lots of images and then deleting a large number of them so I've always done it this way. I'll only import stuff into Lightroom if I think I might attempt to develop and use the image.
 
Again, I don't do motor sport but wildlife must be quite similar. There's probably dozens of ways to do this and it is down to personal preference in the end.

I use the colour labels. Anything obviously dross for whatever reason I use blue.

Something that I really like I process straight away and I use green; something that has potential I use yellow.

In "Library" you can then go to "Select by colour label", click blue and hey presto, your dross comes up, ready selected. I click on one and delete them all with one click.

Then stage by stage I go through the unselected and the yellows until I get down to a more manageable number of images.
 
Thanks for this everyone.

I've been mulling over buying Photo Mechanic the past week. I'm not being an arse here, but I really (honestly) do not see what Photo Mechanic does differently in the culling process or what benefit it has over LR. $150 is a lot of money, no doubt. I've seen the EXIF and folder sorting in play and that does seem good. However, I still fail to see what it does differently to LR specifically in the culling. If I could be enlightened, I'd appreciate it as I'm certain I am totally missing the point (not unheard of!). I know this post sounds facetious but it is genuine. If I could speed up the culling process, that'd be a Godsend.

I especially like Harlequin's method but all info is useful.
 
I go through them all in Faststone photo viewer and cull the duds out. Using Faststone is immediate as I believe it only looks at the embedded jpegs; maybe or maybe not....but it saves the long import time that LR takes. Then I import the small percentage of potential keepers. Further culling obviously takes place during processing.
 
Jesus Quintana said:
I really (honestly) do not see what Photo Mechanic does differently in the culling process or what benefit it has over LR
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I guess the biggest difference is that LR also has the Develop module (for editing) and - for me - the Print module which makes printing a breeze. And I do a fair bit of it. If you don't need these additions then LR probably isn't for you. If I didn't need to PP anything or print, I'd almost certainly not bother with Lightroom. However I'd rather have one piece of software than three. Lightroom's seamless integration between the modules is why I stick with it.
 
I have found a good way to deal with images is to assign P to one the buttons on my wacom tablet, X to another and P and 5 to another. I can literally blitz through a shoot using one hand.
 
Harlequin565 said:
I guess the biggest difference is[...]
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply Harlequin.

Apologies, I should have made myself clearer. I use LR & I really like it (despite buying ON1 RAW because I want to move away from subscriptions. That’s another discussion though!)

I’ve seen a lot of people raving about Photo Mechanic so I’ve watched some YT videos. This is where I fail to see it has any benefits over what I do in LR in the culling process. I understand it has advanced EXIF features but that’s something I’m not using in great detail at the moment.

I’d still be marking my crappy photos from my keepers in both programmes and then trashing the rubbish. This is why I haven’t bought PM. I still think I’m missing the point though about PM!!!

The preview is pretty instant by all accounts in PM, but I don’t really have any lag in LR either.

Anyway, I’m just about to give your original LR suggestion a go as I really like the sound of this (especially point 4 where I have similar groups of photos). This is where my method slows me down. Yours sounds much better and faster.

Mark
 
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