Image culling advice needed.

Spray and pray is not photography.

Maybe you should switch to film for a bit. That will teach you to be considerate every time you release the shutter.

Taking your time in the field means you don't have to spend as much time deleting/culling images.

Yes, storage has become cheap. But is your time worthless?

It is easy to get to the point of having a large number of equally satisfactory frames and get bogged down in trying to separate them and choose one or two.

Another reply has used some perjorative language, which I avoid but like them I do think it is possible to get down to a less generous shooting ratio.

--
Andrew Skinner

O.K., you're right. 11 hours is waaaaay too long.

If you have extra bucks, Photo Mechanic is specifically designed for this sort of thing. It's not cheap, but pros on deadlines use it to edit huge numbers of images in a matter of minutes, even sports assignments which might number several thousand frames. One feature is the ability to tag a whole sequence of similar images, then rotate though enlarged views with a turn of the mouse wheel, finally tagging the best for editing in something like Photoshop.

Another thing: editing is a skill like any other. The more you do it, the better and faster you'll become.

Hope this help.

PhotoMac503 said:

Spray and pray is not photography.

Maybe you should switch to film for a bit. That will teach you to be considerate every time you release the shutter.

Taking your time in the field means you don't have to spend as much time deleting/culling images.

Yes, storage has become cheap. But is your time worthless?

Click to expand...

True for studio or when posed, but not universal. I think it's more important to have a goal, and I say this because I often don't have one.

PhotoMac503 said:

Spray and pray is not photography.

Maybe you should switch to film for a bit. That will teach you to be considerate every time you release the shutter.

Taking your time in the field means you don't have to spend as much time deleting/culling images.

Yes, storage has become cheap. But is your time worthless?

Click to expand...

Did you intend to respond to me?

PhotoMac503 said:

Spray and pray is not photography.

Click to expand...

Is it really spray and pray? 49 scenes with one (or more) models and 20 or so images in each scene sounds reasonable to me particularly if there are wardrobe changes. If I were to do this project with film I would generally allocate one roll of 36 exposure film per scene.

I have done this type of allocation when shooting model portfolios for a Calgary agency back in the 1970's. In those days, 30m of FP3 film (about 22 film rolls of 36 exposure) cost about $8.00, contact print per roll about $0.10 on single weight paper. The models paid extra for prints.

PhotoMac503 said:

Maybe you should switch to film for a bit. That will teach you to be considerate every time you release the shutter.

Taking your time in the field means you don't have to spend as much time deleting/culling images.

Click to expand...

If you have 49 scenes to shoot, you probably don't have time to slow down and take your time.

PhotoMac503 said:

Yes, storage has become cheap. But is your time worthless?

Click to expand...

--
Charles Darwin: "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
tony

Lensmate said:

Invanovich22 said:

Took me 11 more hours culling photos, is this about normal amount of time for this many photos or took way too long?

Click to expand...

Besides, storage is cheap these days and when you go back to look at older images from the past, you might see something you missed previously.

-M

Click to expand...

Yes storage is cheap but it still fills up.

I have found, for myself, if I did a good job of culling initially that I simply just don't miss anything. I don't find stuff I missed, a day later or a year later. My first GUT INSTINCT is good and anything initially cull I get rid of it.

That said it depends on the shoot. I'm talking, as is the OP, of a model shoot or some other commercial project, not family pics or a family vacations which are handled differently. I tend to be VERY ruthless with culling and I don't look back!

John

PhotoMac503 said:

Spray and pray is not photography.

Click to expand...

couched in too negative terms

PhotoMac503 said:

Maybe you should switch to film for a bit. That will teach you to be considerate every time you release the shutter.

Taking your time in the field means you don't have to spend as much time deleting/culling images.

Click to expand...

but often with sports, birds etc you do not have that time

PhotoMac503 said:

Yes, storage has become cheap. But is your time worthless?

Click to expand...

for many time in the field is more precious than time behind the pc

robert1955 said:

PhotoMac503 said:

Spray and pray is not photography.

Click to expand...

couched in too negative terms

robert1955 said:

Maybe you should switch to film for a bit. That will teach you to be considerate every time you release the shutter.

Taking your time in the field means you don't have to spend as much time deleting/culling images.

Click to expand...

but often with sports, birds etc you do not have that time

robert1955 said:

Yes, storage has become cheap. But is your time worthless?

Click to expand...

for many time in the field is more precious than time behind the pc

Click to expand...

+1, well said. Also live performances, races, journalism, etc.

PhotoMac503 said:

Spray and pray is not photography.

Click to expand...

Spray and pray(S&P) is absolutely photography. It's just another tool in the tool chest to use when or if needed. Just because some don't use it doesn't make it any less valid than taking all day to get one shot. I'd rather S&P all day and get 5 good shots than take all day to take one shot and it turns out to be a crappy snapshot! For the record, I shoot some sports and rarely S&P, just not, MY style!

John

PhotoMac503 said:

Spray and pray is not photography.

Click to expand...

Luckily, you don't get to decide that. There are all kinds of weird purist ideas around, concerning what is photography and what is not. We can only speak for ourselves.

Live and let live.

Invanovich22 said:

Made total about 1250 photos yesterday.

Photo shoot consists of 49 scenes that i have taken outside and each scene has about 20-25 photos of model.

Total i get about 130 unique pictures, some of which are similar, but i want to have them all.

Initial culling using FastRawViewer took me about 1 hour to remove all pictures that were no good because image was out of focus etc it was about 288 photos culled.

The mechanics of culling process itself like rating and moving to _Rejected etc was pretty fast, however what took most time is that i had to look trough every photo to see facial expression and select ones i find the most appealing. Had to compare many pictures for same scene again and again.

Took me 11 more hours culling photos, is this about normal amount of time for this many photos or took way too long?

Click to expand...

I'm not sure if this has been suggested already but have you tried Narrative Select ? I've just tried it on 200 images from an informal, family portrait session and it was really great at grading (incredibly quickly) the technical aspects of photographs - focus, whether eyes are open/shut, smiling etc - you can then tag images to reject/cull or to import into either LR or Capture One.

I must admit, I was really impressed by Narrative Select.

It's only available on MacOs. And at the moment, you get 6 projects per month for free (which is fine for me) - or it's available for unlimited projects for monthly sub.

I have no connection to the software - I saw it recently being reviewed on fStoppers.

Invanovich22 said:

Made total about 1250 photos yesterday.

Photo shoot consists of 49 scenes that i have taken outside and each scene has about 20-25 photos of model.

Total i get about 130 unique pictures, some of which are similar, but i want to have them all.

Initial culling using FastRawViewer took me about 1 hour to remove all pictures that were no good because image was out of focus etc it was about 288 photos culled.

The mechanics of culling process itself like rating and moving to _Rejected etc was pretty fast, however what took most time is that i had to look trough every photo to see facial expression and select ones i find the most appealing. Had to compare many pictures for same scene again and again.

Took me 11 more hours culling photos, is this about normal amount of time for this many photos or took way too long?

Click to expand...

It took way too long. It should only take a second to toss a photo for obvious focus or composition problems. It is a matter of experience and confidence, but if you have 20-25 photos of a model, it should not be such a decision to toss the bad ones.

And, it should not take that long to cull further. If your goal is 130 pictures, that's about 3 per model. Bring up the photos for a given model, and just rate about 5 as good and toss the rest. And then take a little more time to narrow it down to 3. Just be sure you get the variety of pose in that second cut.

BTW, don't actually delete them until you are done. Just flag the rejects and discards, and set your viewer to filter them out. If you have a set for a model that doesn't satisfy, then bring them back up and have a second look.

I'll cull from over 1000 photos to keepers in a couple of hours. And I am pretty strict; I shoot a lot and don't want excess photos cluttering my library. After 22 years of shooting digital, I still have too many photos.

Been thinking about this.

Clearly, different types of shoot need different approaches. However, a couple of points.

You can (should) separate your library (in my case it's a Lightroom Catalogue) from everything you have on disk. In my case it contains the images that I think merit further work.

That way, the ex-library images can be stored anywhere, and yes, storage is cheap, especially if it can be stored online/offline/cloud or wherever.

For me, there is also a psychological factor. I know it's very unlikely that I will want to work on one of the ex-library images, but knowing that I could eases my mind. A bit strange and illogical

davidedric said:

Been thinking about this.

Clearly, different types of shoot need different approaches. However, a couple of points.

You can (should) separate your library (in my case it's a Lightroom Catalogue) from everything you have on disk. In my case it contains the images that I think merit further work.

That way, the ex-library images can be stored anywhere, and yes, storage is cheap, especially if it can be stored online/offline/cloud or wherever.

For me, there is also a psychological factor. I know it's very unlikely that I will want to work on one of the ex-library images, but knowing that I could eases my mind. A bit strange and illogical

Click to expand...

I don't understand that approach. The images not in the catalogue [Lr] might as well not exist. I'd use the catalogue to signal which images are relevant, for instance by using Lr's star rating. This is like a library where you can see which books are on the shelves and which are in an off-site depot

robert1955 said:

davidedric said:

Been thinking about this.

Clearly, different types of shoot need different approaches. However, a couple of points.

You can (should) separate your library (in my case it's a Lightroom Catalogue) from everything you have on disk. In my case it contains the images that I think merit further work.

That way, the ex-library images can be stored anywhere, and yes, storage is cheap, especially if it can be stored online/offline/cloud or wherever.

For me, there is also a psychological factor. I know it's very unlikely that I will want to work on one of the ex-library images, but knowing that I could eases my mind. A bit strange and illogical

Click to expand...

I don't understand that approach. The images not in the catalogue [Lr] might as well not exist. I'd use the catalogue to signal which images are relevant, for instance by using Lr's star rating. This is like a library where you can see which books are on the shelves and which are in an off-site depot

Click to expand...

No, doesn't seem very logical, does it? However, those non-catalogue images actually DO exist.

So, I start in PhotoLab 5 where I review the photos and send the ones that I want to work on to Lightroom.

The ones not in Lightroom still exist and are accessible (in my case via PL). Any image that I subsequently want to Import to LR can be done easily, and of course any removed from the Catalogue still exist on disk, and if I also delete them from disk, the original raw is still available.

Yes, I am using more storge through PL's generated dng's or TIFF's, but that doesn't concern me.

It works for me

About Spray and Pray i tried this because i've seen this in a movie long time ago.
This was my very first time shooting person and she never moved, but i keep shooting at 10FPS first half of the photo session , later switched to slower intervals because realized this was waste of frames.

But main difficulty culling was he facial expression some shots i ask her to smile some not and i could not decide which one looks better, also other small details like hands position, people walking in frame, hair blowing on wind, too many little variables that made culling nightmare because this was photo session outside.

Also some frames i made with different angles so i needed to see which images have better composition, i was not thinking about frame composition when shooting because i needed to get idea how to shoot people in general, basics like focus lights etc. My hands need to get used to photographing people first so it works as reflex without thinking much then i can decide better composition and lighting.

davidedric said:

Been thinking about this.

Clearly, different types of shoot need different approaches. However, a couple of points.

You can (should) separate your library (in my case it's a Lightroom Catalogue) from everything you have on disk. In my case it contains the images that I think merit further work.

Click to expand...

I stopped using Lightroom altogether after i started editing images in Photoshop using AdobeCameraRaw i don't feel need for LR anymore, because it takes ages to build catalog and then if i move source files its broken again etc. Then catalog needs to be backed up every week which is bit annoying popup. And i cannot simply plug my external hard drive with images to another computer because it would need to have Lightroom installed + catalog moved, too much headache.

When i used Lightroom last time i switched to storing rating and edits info in external XMP (file with same name as image) rather than in LR catalog that can get corrupted quite a few times on me.

Now i ended up using only Windows Explorer for organizing files, create folders for each photo session by year, quarter, month. date and use FastRawViewer to do initial culling putting all junk to _Rejected sub folder (and possibly delete). Then i use XnView to browse files inside Windows Explorer folders, XnView can read XMP files as well so it load rating and label information.

davidedric said:

robert1955 said:

davidedric said:

Been thinking about this.

Clearly, different types of shoot need different approaches. However, a couple of points.

You can (should) separate your library (in my case it's a Lightroom Catalogue) from everything you have on disk. In my case it contains the images that I think merit further work.

That way, the ex-library images can be stored anywhere, and yes, storage is cheap, especially if it can be stored online/offline/cloud or wherever.

For me, there is also a psychological factor. I know it's very unlikely that I will want to work on one of the ex-library images, but knowing that I could eases my mind. A bit strange and illogical

Click to expand...

I don't understand that approach. The images not in the catalogue [Lr] might as well not exist. I'd use the catalogue to signal which images are relevant, for instance by using Lr's star rating. This is like a library where you can see which books are on the shelves and which are in an off-site depot

Click to expand...

No, doesn't seem very logical, does it? However, those non-catalogue images actually DO exist.

So, I start in PhotoLab 5 where I review the photos and send the ones that I want to work on to Lightroom.

The ones not in Lightroom still exist and are accessible (in my case via PL). Any image that I subsequently want to Import to LR can be done easily, and of course any removed from the Catalogue still exist on disk, and if I also delete them from disk, the original raw is still available.

Yes, I am using more storge through PL's generated dng's or TIFF's, but that doesn't concern me.

It works for me

Click to expand...

I see, now it is a complete workflow

Yes, you can shoot a lot to make sure you get the moment, but you'll pay for that choice later, in the form of time needed for culling and editing.

I can see how model shoots could turn into that, just like sports shoots.

This is why professional photography costs so much. Sure, the photographer spends his time traveling and shooting, but then often spends much more time afterwards doing processing.

One user suggested shooting film for a bit, so you learn to appreciate each shot, but I think putting oneself through the pain of an 11 hour editing session would also have the same result: Lesson Learned!

Now, from your specific lesson, I think you learned that you didn't need to shoot quite that much, because I bet you had many shots from each post that would have all been good. Next time, maybe just a few shots from each post to eliminate blinks and such, instead of dozens.

Also, you'll get faster at the culling and editing.

Last thing: was your computer slowing you down? I bet pros invest in a fast computer to make that onerous chore a bit less so.

john isaacs said:

Invanovich22 said:

Made total about 1250 photos yesterday.

Photo shoot consists of 49 scenes that i have taken outside and each scene has about 20-25 photos of model.

Total i get about 130 unique pictures, some of which are similar, but i want to have them all.

Initial culling using FastRawViewer took me about 1 hour to remove all pictures that were no good because image was out of focus etc it was about 288 photos culled.

The mechanics of culling process itself like rating and moving to _Rejected etc was pretty fast, however what took most time is that i had to look trough every photo to see facial expression and select ones i find the most appealing. Had to compare many pictures for same scene again and again.

Took me 11 more hours culling photos, is this about normal amount of time for this many photos or took way too long?

Click to expand...

It took way too long. It should only take a second to toss a photo for obvious focus or composition problems. It is a matter of experience and confidence, but if you have 20-25 photos of a model, it should not be such a decision to toss the bad ones.

And, it should not take that long to cull further. If your goal is 130 pictures, that's about 3 per model. Bring up the photos for a given model, and just rate about 5 as good and toss the rest. And then take a little more time to narrow it down to 3. Just be sure you get the variety of pose in that second cut.

BTW, don't actually delete them until you are done. Just flag the rejects and discards, and set your viewer to filter them out. If you have a set for a model that doesn't satisfy, then bring them back up and have a second look.

I'll cull from over 1000 photos to keepers in a couple of hours. And I am pretty strict; I shoot a lot and don't want excess photos cluttering my library. After 22 years of shooting digital, I still have too many photos.

Click to expand...

This is the best solution and I use with ACDSee. I mark the bad ones red and at any point i can filter on them and delete them in an instant. I also use their number ratings. I wish i would have been better at the culling process 10 years ago before i amassed so many photos.