Please!!! Workflow for beginner

In a nutshell, my goal is to be able to take several hundred shots (I'm still doing some very crude experimenting with camera settings) and quickly cull them down to a few groups of similar shots, then quickly compare the shots within each group and end up with two or three keepers for the day.

Lightroom does everything I need but is way too slow. Photo Mechanic is wonderful for quickly eliminating the rejects but is expensive (and I've got to "import" twice before they're in Lightroom).

What should I be doing? I'm assuming that I should be initially be skimming (doing quick selections) through the photos with something like Picasa or ACDSee before importing to Lightroom.

I've tried researching this a bit but have become frustrated and thought I'd just throw the question out there. Sorry if it's been answered before.

I'm assuming that the answer will lie in some free photo-viewer software that lets me do a quick initial screening before moving into Lightroom for detailed comparisons. (But I'm open to other ideas. For instance, if a hardware upgrade makes Lightroom as quick as Photo Mechanic, I'd consider spending some money on hardware - perhaps a SSD?)

Thanks in advance for helping me out!

The fastest way I've found to quickly "cull the herd" is to just bang through the images with one finger on the "X" key. Flag the junk on the fly and then sort by "Unflagged" to see what's left.

Once you have your "Picks", process per normal, export and then when you have time, go back and sort by "Rejected" and kill 'em all off.

Thanks Jay, but I think my personal idiosyncrasies might be the problem. Photo Mechanic lets me blast through the group without second guessing but Lightroom takes so long to load that I end up giving extra consideration to photos that should have been immediately trashed.

Just for kicks, I timed the processing for 89 photos I shot tonight. Just sunset/dog shots, not really expecting anything spectacular in the whole bunch. Maybe a couple of keepers, maybe none. (Several photos showed my lens hood only partially screwed on - typical for my impromptu shoots.)

Using Photo Mechanic, I was able to copy from the card, review the group, and in 7 minutes I had deleted 56 photos, with 33 candidates for keepers.

Using Lightroom, it took 8 minutes to import all the photos and then reject only 20 of them. For some reason, I felt like the slower loading time encouraged me to keep more photos. (Photo Mechanic goes from one raw image to the next instantaneously whereas Lightroom took some time to load each photo.) Even though I rejected fewer, I was expecting a larger difference in total time - probably because they seem to take so much longer to load.

Funny - going back to Lightroom now, I can go from one photo to the next with no loading time. Maybe I need to Import and then do a leisurely review with no ratings, then go back and rate photos on the faster second pass.

Perhaps I should just figure out how to use Lightroom more efficiently instead of adding another tool for the initial screening.

(By the way, I really like the no-nonsense feeling of Photo Mechanic. If I was doing this for a living and had to worry about production deadlines, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it. For an amateur like me though, it's a pretty expensive luxury.)

Now I just have to learn the most effective way to use the Compare tool in LR 3.2. I've read that there's a bug that rejects both photos instead of just rejecting the candidate. In any case, it's not working as I would expect it to.

Try this.

Well, I just use Lightroom, and do like Jay says.

Now, if LR is too slow, first I'd look at how to speed it up. First, make sure you have plenty of RAM -- 3-4 GB on a 32 bit system or on a 64 bit system start with 4 GB and go up from there.

Also you can tweak things -- with LR there is, for instance, Catalog Preferences that you can set to determine how you handle previews, and these can go from slower to faster.

But, there are people who do like you do, using external apps to do the culling, and someone will likely chip in with a good cost-effective one. Not more simple than LR-only, but it might speed things up.

If LR is really a slow-down for basic processing, you could consider DPP (the Canon software). It has a "small footprint" and so it can move quite quickly through selecting bad images and quickly processing good shots for conversion.

Thanks Tim - I'm going to read that in the morning when I've got all cylinders firing (I just looked at a Honda Pilot. The salesman told me that it runs on just three cylinders when it doesn't need all six - I thought he was joking.)

I realize this file is over-processed, but at least I got it out of the camera and was able to share it. That's a start for me! : )

Edit: Read Tim's link and particularly want to commit this part to memory: "The order of using the sliders is important. Exposure comes first, in conjunction with blacks - they control the left and right hand edges of the histogram, and stretch the histogram as necessary. Highlight recovery comes in there somewhere too. The brightness comes next, it shifts the center of the histogram. Only then can color temperature be accurately set - of course you need a calibrated monitor. Once this is done you can start playing with contrast, and vibrance/saturation"

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cacawcacaw wrote in post #11012619
For some reason, I felt like the slower loading time encouraged me to keep more photos. (Photo Mechanic goes from one raw image to the next instantaneously whereas Lightroom took some time to load each photo.) Even though I rejected fewer, I was expecting a larger difference in total time - probably because they seem to take so much longer to load.

My experience as well, and why I use Expression Media for a "first pass". (Also still use it because it allows me to do some things that LR2 won't)

cacawcacaw wrote in post #11012619
Funny - going back to Lightroom now, I can go from one photo to the next with no loading time.

Probably because the previews are rendered now and weren't before.

I use ACDsee Photo Manager and it works great. I use the arrow keys to go through an almost full-size image and then use the mouse to add it to the image basket. When I'm done I copy the image basket to a folder named "keepers" and then I get editing!

What about using DPP and the 3 check mark method? I experimented last night with PSE and found that the load time for the software is just plain slow - just like every other photoshop program ever made. DPP opens almost instantly. It's not my hardware either.

If you think this is going to be a big hobby just invest in a more robust computer system and Lightroom to start.

René Damkot wrote in post #11013678
... why I use Expression Media for a "first pass". ...

Thanks, I'm not familiar with that one and will check it out. Looks like it costs $90 though. : (

mulder32 wrote in post #11014231
I use ACDsee Photo Manager and it works great.

I used ACDSee many years ago and liked how quick it was. I'll give it another try.

Riveredger wrote in post #11014390
What about using DPP and the 3 check mark method?

DPP is pretty good but the high quality previews still take a few moments to load.

NatDeroxL7 wrote in post #11014643
If you think this is going to be a big hobby just invest in a more robust computer system and Lightroom to start.

I've done that. I have a reasonable computer with 8 GB of RAM and a decent hard disk and bought Lightroom and Photoshop a couple of months ago. Of course, I simultaneously increased the burden by shooting high-resolution photos in RAW.

It may seem trivial but I really like having the ability to blaze through full sized previews and make quick selections. Lightroom has all the tools I need but if I go too fast, I'm having trouble telling if a photo is out of focus or if the preview is only partially loaded. I know it's just a quick moment before the whole preview is loaded but it seems to take the fun out of zipping through the batch of photos.

Photo Mechanic must "pre-fetch" the high quality previews because I can go as fast as I want and never see a partially loaded preview. I can make a split-second decision as to whether I want to keep a photo or not.

If I can find an inexpensive alternative to Photo Mechanic, I'll probably go that route. If I can't, I'll start concentrating on tweaking Lightroom and see if I can speed up the previews a bit. I don't mind increasing the program load time or the importing time but I'd really like to decrease the preview loading time. (My preference would be to use Lightroom for everything and keep the whole operation under one roof.)

So, two questions: Are there any free programs that load previews as fast as Photo Mechanic? Or, is there any way to adjust the settings in Lightroom to speed up the preview process?

Have you tried LR with Previews set to "Minimal" ?

You can then set your thumbnails such that you see two by two which is large enough to make basic judgements on framing and focus. You can get through a lot of images quite quickly this way.

Thanks Jay.

I already had my Import DNG Creation - JPEG Previews set to Medium (Choices are Large, Medium, None) but I just discovered the "Catalog Settings" button where I could set the standard preview size to 1024 Pixels, and Low Quality.

Edit: Oh, okay - Now I see on the Import window where I can set Render Previews to Minimal.

It also seems to help speed if I reduce the size of my Lightroom window to a smaller size and disable my second monitor but maybe that's just wishful thinking.

cacawcacaw wrote in post #11016056
DPP is pretty good but the high quality previews still take a few moments to load.

Try the "quick check tool".

cacawcacaw wrote in post #11016056
So, two questions: Are there any free programs that load previews as fast as Photo Mechanic? Or, is there any way to adjust the settings in Lightroom to speed up the preview process?

There might be. AFAIK PM uses the built in jpg previews, not the actual raw data to preview images. That explains why it's so fast. (Same goes for Expression Media if set so in the prefs)

I bought iView before LR existed.
Not sure if I would buy it again today, since LR does pretty much the same (with a few exceptions)

Hey René,

Thanks, I didn't know about the Quick Check Tool but Photo Mechanic is still the fastest. I tried loading non-sequential photos in Photo Mechanic and found that it slowed down to the same speed as other programs so I'm assuming that Photo Mechanic uses some sort of pre-loading for the next few photos.

But, it's too expensive for me, so I'm going to be looking at ways to speed up Lightroom.