I've got this cool camera! Now what?

[Monty.Craig]

Hi folks... well I am running into something I had not considered before. I no longer have "contact sheets" to look at when editing my work. I now have many images to look at, and I am finding that I am acting like a beginner once again when it comes to deleting images! I am having trouble deciding what to cut, and what to keep. Unlike film, where you always have the negative laying around somewhere, once you push the delete button, they are gone... I have thought of getting a stand alone Hard Drive to keep every shot on, but that seems foolish even as I type this.

Can someone please help me with this process.... this is even before i get into Photoshop. I do use Lightroom 3 to convert Raw files to DNG files, but has anyone come up with a good system to store the images that you keep? Since I am just now starting out, I want to develop good habits from the start so that I handle my work right. I am considering a Hard Drive to store my work on, and back it up with another Hard Drive in a mirror system. But I am aware that I may be going down a wrong path, so if anyone else could share what you do in organizing and editing your work, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Monty

[edge100]

Hi folks... well I am running into something I had not considered before. I no longer have "contact sheets" to look at when editing my work. I now have many images to look at, and I am finding that I am acting like a beginner once again when it comes to deleting images! I am having trouble deciding what to cut, and what to keep. Unlike film, where you always have the negative laying around somewhere, once you push the delete button, they are gone... I have thought of getting a stand alone Hard Drive to keep every shot on, but that seems foolish even as I type this.

Can someone please help me with this process.... this is even before i get into Photoshop. I do use Lightroom 3 to convert Raw files to DNG files, but has anyone come up with a good system to store the images that you keep? Since I am just now starting out, I want to develop good habits from the start so that I handle my work right. I am considering a Hard Drive to store my work on, and back it up with another Hard Drive in a mirror system. But I am aware that I may be going down a wrong path, so if anyone else could share what you do in organizing and editing your work, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Monty

First, why are you working with DNGs over your camera's native raw format? Just curious; I don't see the advantage.

Second, why are you deleting anything? In LR, you can easily use collections, flags, colours, ratings, etc to manage your keepers from your non-keepers. The only images I throw away are those that are absolutely, 100% garbage (e.g. I took a shot with the lens cap on). Yesterday I took a shot that was 3 stops overexposed; it looked completely blown out, but LR4 managed to salvage a useable shot from it (colour balance was terrible, but it looks good in B&W). Moral of the story: don't throw images away.

I use collection sets for each shoot/trip/client, and then pool ALL of the images from the shoot into a collection in that set, and then create another collection just for the keepers (which I select by flagging...I don't use ratings or colours very much). Edit, sequentially rename the keepers, and export using services to Photoshelter/Flickr/FB/blog.

[siiilent]

Hey Monty,

Lightroom has the ability to put a rating on your images.
Here is my workflow:

- Delete out of focus images/ horrible exposure that can't be saved
- Back up remaining images on an external hard drive.
- Put a rating of 3 on images I like/want to use
- Go through the images I rated 3, and choose my favorite ones and rate them 4
- Repeat above step on images rated 4 and rate 5 on my fav. (These will be the ones I spend the most time editing to showcase)

I find this method works best because every time I look at the image again, I may notice something about it I like or dislike and change the rating.


Hi folks... well I am running into something I had not considered before. I no longer have "contact sheets" to look at when editing my work. I now have many images to look at, and I am finding that I am acting like a beginner once again when it comes to deleting images! I am having trouble deciding what to cut, and what to keep. Unlike film, where you always have the negative laying around somewhere, once you push the delete button, they are gone... I have thought of getting a stand alone Hard Drive to keep every shot on, but that seems foolish even as I type this.

Can someone please help me with this process.... this is even before i get into Photoshop. I do use Lightroom 3 to convert Raw files to DNG files, but has anyone come up with a good system to store the images that you keep? Since I am just now starting out, I want to develop good habits from the start so that I handle my work right. I am considering a Hard Drive to store my work on, and back it up with another Hard Drive in a mirror system. But I am aware that I may be going down a wrong path, so if anyone else could share what you do in organizing and editing your work, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Monty

[RichSoansPhotos]

I just rate them five and work on the twenty that I want to use for my work with a red flag, whittle them down to ten and then use them.

All out of focus, too dark and terrible compositions are marked rejected (I don't delete them straight away)

[crn3371]

I just store everything on multiple hard drives. Everything is on my internal drive, backed up to an external drive. I have a second external that I keep off site.

[rick_reno]

I use more than one hard drive, and rent space from Apple & Google for off site storage.

[nathancarter]

I delete a lot of stuff. I delete lots of things from the camera, then delete even more once I've culled through it in my Lightroom library. If it's not a keeper, it gets deleted.

However, my criteria for keepers can vary quite a bit depending on what I'm shooting.
1) For things like personal family events, my criteria is pretty lenient. Slightly blurry, slightly out of focus, lousy composition, not quite exposed right - these generally don't break a photo, since I'm really just looking for memories of the family or event. So I keep all but the worst.
2) For event/performance photos, I keep enough to show a good variety of the event. I shoot a lot of dance performances: For solo routines, I generally will keep 3-5 shots from each song; for group numbers, I keep enough to have one or two good shots of each performer. However, I shoot way more than that. I generally shoot about 200-300 shots for an hour-long performance, but I keep 30-50 shots. The rest get deleted. I don't need 300 photos for adequate coverage of an hour-long event.
3) For stuff like product photography, I'll keep only one final shot per "pose" of the product. If I shoot nine shots that aren't quite right, but on the tenth shot the lighting and composition are perfect, then I keep only that tenth shot. The other nine get deleted. There's no reason to ever look at mediocre shots (or show them to the client!!) when I have a perfect shot to look at instead.

If someday, somehow, I ever get the feeling that I don't have enough mediocre or bad pictures on my hard drive, it's pretty easy to go out and make more mediocre or bad pictures.

In the last thread I saw about this subject, someone said "In the future, I can go back and look at the bad shots, and learn from them." While I suppose this is true for some people, I have two reasons to disagree: First, I ALREADY have learned from those bad shots, so there's no need to revisit them; second, as I grow and improve in my skills, I want to go back and look at what I once considered GOOD, and tear it apart and figure out how to make it better. I don't need to improve my bad shots, I need to improve my good shots.



tl;dr: I only keep the good stuff; everything else gets permanently deleted.

[edge100]

A little reading about why you should almost NEVER delete photos:

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2007/04/words-of-wisdom-from-avedon-and-why-i-save-every-picture/

http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/halstead/monica.html

Hard drive space, while not as cheap as it used to be, is still pretty cheap.

[theatrus]

Step 1: Everything goes to my 8 disk network ZFS pool (6TB right now).

Step 2: Everything goes to a backup hard drive set.

Step 3: Everything gets trickle uploaded to Crashplan (unlimited, at least for now)

Step 4: Really important stuff gets loaded on Amazon S3 via Transmit to two different buckets into two regions (currently US East and EU).

Step 5: Same really important stuff gets moved to a safe deposit box yearly on a hard drive.

Step 4 and 5 are things I manually selected to really treasure.

I still feel I don't have enough redundancy :(

[tonylong]

Monty, I keep it simple, but external hard drives have become a "must". I have about 50k images in my library. I'm not a professional, but I am an enthusiast, so I've shot a lot over the years...

My workflow/approach: I load a shoot into my internal "data" drive, importing into Lightroom. My short-term processing is to delete shots that are "bad", out of focus, bad composition, bad exposure, etc, and then to develop selected photos for output, for the Web, printing, sharing in some other way. I will apply keywording and collections, etc.

After the short-term stuff, I will move shoots/folders in Lightroom onto my external "library" drive. In Lightroom it's as simple as dragging and dropping a folder/shoot onto a "parent"/year folder that is in my external drive and is in my LR library. I also back up my library onto another dedicated back-up external drive (it stays disconnected until I need it).

Like I said, pretty simple (I don't keep multiple Lightroom catalogs, just the one with 50k images) but it all works in a unified way.

[AvailableLight]

I have a NAS but haven't backed up the last couple of years. I don't have Lightroom or anything; just organize the images by year/month/date on Windows Explorer. I need to rethink my system, get an external hard drive, etc. Buying and learning LR will have to wait.

[theatrus]

I have a NAS but haven't backed up the last couple of years. I don't have Lightroom or anything; just organize the images by year/month/date on Windows Explorer. I need to rethink my system, get an external hard drive, etc. Buying and learning LR will have to wait.

I first organize into folders. I don't let LR pick my organization.

[Monty.Craig]

Wow folks! There's a lot of great info here to consider. I appreciate your help everybody.

To answer one question though, I was watching a video podcast from Adobe Creative Suite podcast with Terry White. He said that changing our raw files to DNG files insures that they will be able to be opened in the future... Makes sense to me since I can no longer play cassettes!

[TooManyShots]

My culling process is to pick the best shots. Not to delete the worst ones. :) No, I don't delete them unless I am running low on space. I picked the best ones and put them in another folder. The bad ones (missed focus, blurry, underexposure, chopped off figures, and bad compositions) I would leave them alone.

[tonylong]

Wow folks! There's a lot of great info here to consider. I appreciate your help everybody.

To answer one question though, I was watching a video podcast from Adobe Creative Suite podcast with Terry White. He said that changing our raw files to DNG files insures that they will be able to be opened in the future... Makes sense to me since I can no longer play cassettes!

Yes there are proponents of DNG and certainly Adobe has plenty in their "team" since DNG is an Adobe "format" that they are promoting to be "universal".

But, it has not yet been adopted in any "universal" sense. So, in other words, you can't open a DNG file in the various popular non-Adobe Raw converters that are out there, including, notably, the Canon Raw software Digital Photo Professional.

So if someone really wants to use DNG for, say, the smaller-than-CR2 files, fine, except I'd advise folks to at least back up your CR2 files just in case you want to use some Raw software that doesn't "know" DNG!

[ejenner]

1. delete crap
2. process the rest of the images to 90% with ~30-50%% of effort
3. delete duplicates or keep the sharpest of very similar shots (if in doubt keep)
4. 'final' processing of all images
5. flag shots I want to keep the raw files (if in doubt - keep)
6. write out all files as .jpeg

The 4-6 weeks later
1. check though shots and pick any extras I want to keep the raws for (if in doubt keep)
2. save images I am going to delete raws as 95-98% .jpeg
3. delete raws I'm not going to keep

Everything is backed up twice (not including my working machine) and I keep the original images on the CF card until they are processed and backed up (in case I accidentally delete something in the initial pass through). Or you could just back them up straight away and not touch them until a few months later when you are sure you don't need them.

Actually my work machine HD just died but I didn't lose any files, just an hour or so of editing. First time I have ever lost a hard drive (but not data) and the machine is one of the newest ones I work with.

There are only 2 types of people - those that have lost data and those that will lose data.

Definitely get two HD or some dual backup system. I'm anal enough to have one at home and one at work.

[ejenner]

As far as file do, I know everyone has their own system, but just in case this is what my directory looks like. All images have names like 2012_03_20_4560 or 2012_03_20_S4560 (shot with the S95), so if I see an image I know where to look in my folders. I use a 'renamer' utility and keep the same image number as in the camera for the last 4 digits (this can be very helpful). I add the 'S' just in case the numbers should overlap.
Folders look like:

2012
---RAW
---------Local
---------------01 Jan
---------------------2012_01_20 Mt Falcon
---------------------2012_01_24-27 Brekenridge
---------------02 Feb
---------------------2012_02_02 Kids
---------London
---------------2012_03_12 Covent garden
---------------2012_03_13
---------Vienna
---------------<more subdirectories>
---Local
---------01 Jan
---------------2012_01_20 Mt Falcon
---------------2012_01_24-27 Brekenridge
---------02 Feb
---------------2012_02_02 Kids
---London
---------2012_03_12 Covent garden
---------2012_03_13
---Vienna
---------<more subdirectories>



So all the raw files are under one sub directory and all the processed .jpegs are under a mirror directory system (I could also do that at the top level and have 2012 raw and 2012 processed).

with keywords and that system I can find a photo that I remember, but not the date or get to the raw file of a .jpeg that I'm looking at.

[AvailableLight]

As far as file do, I know everyone has their own system, but just in case this is what my directory looks like. All images have names like 2012_03_20_4560 or 2012_03_20_S4560 (shot with the S95), so if I see an image I know where to look in my folders. I use a 'renamer' utility and keep the same image number as in the camera for the last 4 digits (this can be very helpful). I add the 'S' just in case the numbers should overlap.
Folders look like:

2012
---RAW
---------Local
---------------01 Jan
---------------------2012_01_20 Mt Falcon
---------------------2012_01_24-27 Brekenridge
---------------02 Feb
---------------------2012_02_02 Kids
---------London
---------------2012_03_12 Covent garden
---------------2012_03_13
---------Vienna
---------------<more subdirectories>
---Local
---------01 Jan
---------------2012_01_20 Mt Falcon
---------------2012_01_24-27 Brekenridge
---------02 Feb
---------------2012_02_02 Kids
---London
---------2012_03_12 Covent garden
---------2012_03_13
---Vienna
---------<more subdirectories>



So all the raw files are under one sub directory and all the processed .jpegs are under a mirror directory system (I could also do that at the top level and have 2012 raw and 2012 processed).

with keywords and that system I can find a photo that I remember, but not the date or get to the raw file of a .jpeg that I'm looking at.
Which renamer utility are you using?

AJ

[nathancarter]

I first organize into folders. I don't let LR pick my organization.


When you import into Lightroom directly from the memory card, you can specify the folder/directory into which your files will be copied. You can also move those folders around within the Library module, if you later decide to change your organization.

Seems like sorting the photos into folders first, then adding them to the Lightroom library, is just double work.

What am I missing?

[ejenner]

Which renamer utility are you using?

AJ

http://www.den4b.com/?x=products&product=renamer

[AvailableLight]

http://www.den4b.com/?x=products&product=renamer
Thanks!

[tonylong]

When you import into Lightroom directly from the memory card, you can specify the folder/directory into which your files will be copied. You can also move those folders around within the Library module, if you later decide to change your organization.

Seems like sorting the photos into folders first, then adding them to the Lightroom library, is just double work.

What am I missing?

It's funny, I learned Lightroom "from the ground up" and have always used it for my organizational and naming stuff, especially utilizing the Import tools. It's quick and it's efficient that way!

So it is always interesting and a bit amusing to see people who grapple with the LR tools. I get the idea that a lot of folks don't want to bother working through some good learning materials, "primers" and tutorials and such, that cover this ground. They are kind of getting into LR through the "back door", seemingly. But, to each his/her own!

My daughter does use LR but has a resistance to learning its "ways". So, I tend to have little conflicts with her whenever she asks for my help -- I try to explain something to her and she blows me off and I end up just throwing up my hands and walking away...:)!