Irene McC
Legend
- Location
- CPT, South Africa
Either rename them all to 'Camaro' so they can be selected together via search function etc for each group of cars by name, or again colour code for different cars
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Sorting/Culling Conundrum
- Thread starter Brownie
- Start date
-
- Tags
- image processing software
- Location
- Massachusetts, USA
You need to cull AND sort. What I might try is a first pass to cull obvious bad ones and add a keyword that identifies the car. Later you can search by the keyword to gather all the instances of a particular car.
If Darktable supports keywording.
Right but now we're back to what I'm trying to avoid, which is time.
There were about 20 Camaros out there last time, so I'd the code would need to be very specific. Orange Camaro; 1971 Camaro; Orange 1971 Camaro; 1971 Orange Camaro With Black Hood, etc.. There aren't enough colors or stars to do any kind of sort to handle a hundred or more cars. It's going to take me as long or longer to do all of that than just continuing on as I am.
I'm thinking what I may try is this: Create a subfolder and call it 'current car', then drag/drop every photo of a specific vehicle into it that I can find. Once they're all there, decide which to keep and dump the rest. Move the keeper(s) into another folder, I can be creative with the name and call it 'keepers'
. Then, do the next car, and the next, and so on. The advantage here would be that as more cars get moved out of the master folder, the smaller it gets and the fewer photos to go through. It would probably be pretty cumbersome at the start but more streamlined at the end.
- Location
- Massachusetts, USA
I would use a single word but I suppose 100+ words would be hard to keep track of. No matter how you approach it, it's still a lot of photos to sort out. Photo Mechanic is designed specifically for high volume. The new Photo Mechanic Plus has now added a database. If you're planning on selling prints or files $230 might be a good investment.
I've looked at Photo Mechanic but remain undecided. It looks like the biggest advantage it has is speed in opening and reviewing the files, but since it depends on rankings and colors it doesn't offer much in sorting over a manual application of the same idea.
Do you use it? How intuitive is it to try? I thought about the 30 day free trial but don't want to invest in a steep learning curve just to find it doesn't help.
- Location
- Massachusetts, USA
I don't use it. I was waiting for the database feature to be added but now would prefer a solution that's cross compatible with iPad. I know it's a favorite among sports and news photographers specifically for sorting and picking from thousands of photos at import time.
Stu
Veteran
- Location
- Melb. Aus.
I like the one just left of the middle....no hang-on the one next to it....gosh no....the third one to the right! 
I thought I'd resurrect this thread in the hope my new work flow may help others. On the advice of someone on another forum I downloaded Faststone image viewer. It is an incredibly fast way to view/compare/sort/cull images and it's totally free. It's the same idea as Photo Mechanic but $0.00. It opens RAW files with no waiting, and you can save in any format you want or just leave them as they are. And, although I don't use the features, it will do basic processing as well.
The second part of my workflow improvement was to set up batch processing in Darktable. I'm still refining this, but it only takes a click to process a folder full of images after sorting. I still look through them all for minor adjustments, like a composition crop or something. So far I've been applying lens correction after the fact, but I am going to adjust workflow to have separate folders for each lens and save a batch profile for each. That will result in hundreds of fewer clicks.
How much time does it save? When I started this thread, a Saturday event would result in 2-3 hours Sunday morning, another session about the same length Sunday evening, and a couple hours each evening for the following week, about 6 days overall. This past weekend took a couple hours Saturday evening and the typical Sunday sessions, but an hour on Monday evening wrapped it up. That's substantial. This was my first stab at it, so it should get faster yet as I get more experience.
The second part of my workflow improvement was to set up batch processing in Darktable. I'm still refining this, but it only takes a click to process a folder full of images after sorting. I still look through them all for minor adjustments, like a composition crop or something. So far I've been applying lens correction after the fact, but I am going to adjust workflow to have separate folders for each lens and save a batch profile for each. That will result in hundreds of fewer clicks.
How much time does it save? When I started this thread, a Saturday event would result in 2-3 hours Sunday morning, another session about the same length Sunday evening, and a couple hours each evening for the following week, about 6 days overall. This past weekend took a couple hours Saturday evening and the typical Sunday sessions, but an hour on Monday evening wrapped it up. That's substantial. This was my first stab at it, so it should get faster yet as I get more experience.
- Location
- Beaumaris, Melbourne, Australia
- Name
- John ...
Tim, I use Bridge, keywords and Photoshop actions that I recorded myself to do all the grunt work.
My complete workflow starts with adding a prefix to the filename at upload into a folder per card, the folder has an embedded date in collation order (yyyy-mm-dd) and the card number. These all collate correctly from newest to oldest. Separate head sub-folders for each camera, all under a head folder named "_All_Images".
Makes backup dead simple.
A full description of my workflow takes several pages, so will not copy it here!
My complete workflow starts with adding a prefix to the filename at upload into a folder per card, the folder has an embedded date in collation order (yyyy-mm-dd) and the card number. These all collate correctly from newest to oldest. Separate head sub-folders for each camera, all under a head folder named "_All_Images".
Makes backup dead simple.
A full description of my workflow takes several pages, so will not copy it here!
Something to be aware of with Faststone (great software) is that I believe by default it displays embedded preview images from RAWs. Not a huge deal for a culling scenario and it is of course much faster than asking it to decode RAWs. If you do want to change it there is an option in Settings.
I have been mulling switching editors since Capture One's pricing fiascos over the last six months. I could not quite get used to the Darktable UI but it does seem pretty capable. Maybe I need to give it another look. I have been seriously considering going with DXO PhotoLab, but it has quirks of its own (don't they all). Or maybe I will just continue with C1 as familiarity is a strong attractor, lol.
I have been mulling switching editors since Capture One's pricing fiascos over the last six months. I could not quite get used to the Darktable UI but it does seem pretty capable. Maybe I need to give it another look. I have been seriously considering going with DXO PhotoLab, but it has quirks of its own (don't they all). Or maybe I will just continue with C1 as familiarity is a strong attractor, lol.
- Location
- Beaumaris, Melbourne, Australia
- Name
- John ...
Pressing the "a" key when the embedded image is displayed will display the full size RAW in FastStone Viewer.
The Adobe Photography plan is cheaper and more powerful than either of them.
I just use it for culling/sorting/ comparing.
You really should try to get used to Darktable. It’s every bit as powerful as Adobe for processing. It will do basic editing, but nothing fancy. I’ve found that DT and Affinity are all I need. Someday I’ll learn how to batch process in Affinity. The cost is dirt cheap and they’ve already released 2 upgrades since the new version came out last year. No additional cost. Excellent NR in both.
I have never been a fan of LR, but maybe the UI has evolved and I should give it another chance. I havve looked at Affinity too, mixed feelings on that one. Also checked out Luminar, ACDSee, RawTherapee/ART, GIMP, and probably some others I have already forgotten. They all do global controls pretty well - exposure, contrast, saturation, etc. I also want to be able to exert fine control over an area when I want it, and here they vary a lot. And there is the UI in general, which seems either crazy complex and hard to grok or oversimplified. And then there is the push to add AI to everything.
If I am honest with myself, a lot of post-processing I do is because the camera/lens recorded an image differently than I thought it did at the time. With the better color and image quality of recent bodies, I have actually toyed with the idea of getting a new body, dumping the whole RAW workflow and go JPEGs. There are full-time professionals whose work I enjoy who do JPEGs, so I know it can work, but I would be looking at pretty expensive-to-me bodies so I am not sure I want to jump off that cliff.
If I am honest with myself, a lot of post-processing I do is because the camera/lens recorded an image differently than I thought it did at the time. With the better color and image quality of recent bodies, I have actually toyed with the idea of getting a new body, dumping the whole RAW workflow and go JPEGs. There are full-time professionals whose work I enjoy who do JPEGs, so I know it can work, but I would be looking at pretty expensive-to-me bodies so I am not sure I want to jump off that cliff.
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK.
- Name
- Charles
And there are professionals, Kevin Mullins for example, who recommend JPEGs, and using the camera set to P mode. Pretty much how I use my camera! My 'editing' generally consists of crop to suit subject on my iPad. Job done!
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- Location
- Beaumaris, Melbourne, Australia
- Name
- John ...
It took me many years to learn how to take a photo of what I was seeing, rather than what I was looking at. Freeman Patterson "Photography and the Art of Seeing", along with Michael Freeman's "The Photographer's Eye" and Harald Mante's "The Photograph Colour Composition and Design", among others, and my wife's observations, helped greatly.
e.g. the lost keys:
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- Location
- Northern Virginia, USA
About a year or so ago I discovered a program called Narrative Select, which I find even faster and easier to use than Photo Mechanic, which I also still have. One feature I especially appreciate is their zoom feature, where I can really see the details of an image and determine immediately that, oops, no, this image is not going to work, some flaws in it that I wouldn't have seen otherwise, and then I move on to the next image, which may be just right, focus nailed, no minor problems, etc. The program works in similar ways to PM but I just find it easier and more intuitive for me, somehow. I can whip through a bunch of images that were shot in 20 fps burst mode fairly quickly and it really has reduced the amount of time I spend culling my images.
