Lessons

Lesson Info

Rules for Selecting Images

Now we're going to go up to the top and we will just start selecting the images when we select images there's quite a few things that we want to do in order to make our process better and faster, and I talked in real depth about this in the ultimate light room workflow, but I'm going to recap the four basic rules and the rules are basically that number one that we're going to we're going to do everything by comparative review so that we're looking at multiple images at one time rather than one at a time. Secondly, we're going to make sure that we are doing it in a maur instinctual, reactive way rather than scrutinizing because the more we scrutinized, the more we kind of lose the spontaneity of the shots, so we're not going to be scrutinizing and back and forth back and forth we're going to trust our judgment and we're going to make the decisions fast, and that sometimes means that you will, uh, choose an image and not necessarily choose the best image. But you choose an image that you...

love so doesn't matter if one's slightly better because you'll never know and they'll never know because never look at the other one once you find one that you like, you're going to go with it, so that's rule number two is that we're gonna do things in a reactive and a got way we're going to trust our instinct number three is we're gonna get rid of distractions and number four is that we're going to on ly pick no rejects, so those are the four rules and you're going to see those rules in operation as I edit here, so in keeping with the rule of distractions were going to get the tab, he will get rid of our side panels so that we can get rid of those we can also click on these little triangles at the top of the bottom to get rid of those types of things, and I can hit the back slash key to get rid of the library filter. I can even go to the window to the screen mode and put it in a full screen mode, so I put it in full screen mode, which gets rid of this upper bar here too. I want to get rid of much distraction as possible and give myself a cz much room on the screen as possible to make my selection. I don't need this bar down here either, so the tiki will get rid of the toolbar. So now I've got a lot of space to work with, so the more you khun tab those things out, the better off you'll be and then if you ever need and you can hit shift tab and they'll all come back in and then shift have again I'll go back out yeah I work on two monitors how did those keys worked if I'm actually sort of good question okay, so if if I pull I'm gonna pull those bottom barks actually want the bottom barnaby there because it's the filmstrip and on top of the filmstrip there's the to monitor and that second monitor once you click it will be active on your second monitor in our case it's pretending to be a second monitor and then whatever you if you hit shift like okay, let me go through the keystrokes and is survey mode so if I click on end if I have, say, a set of files selected here and end it goes into survey mode, which is a much more pleasing, less distracting wayto look your images so that keeps in in line with the rule of no distractions so want to get rid of all of our visual distractions because in the grid see how messy it is, but in survey it's very clean and it gives you the biggest possible files to look at so survey motives you're is where you would look at things so I live in the survey mode, but if I want the survey mode to be on that second monitor I hit shift end and now that's in school if I want the second monitor b grid I hit shift g and now it's in the grid. If I want the second monitor beat in the loop, modi should shift e and now it's in the loop mode. So whatever the code is for the monitor, one it's shift that same code and that gives you on the monitor to brilliant. So then if I want to turn it off, I just hit shift again. The monitor goes dark, great cool and keep in mind that two monitors tasks your computer, and so if you have a computer that's a little slower and it's slowing down on you, and you're not using this monitor at the moment, make sure that you turn and off of light room so that light room is not feeding to it and light room will speed up. So and if you're going to use to monitors, make sure that you are using as fast, uh, your cp, your cpu needs to be fast and you're carly or graphic cards need to be really fast. Thank you. Okay, so we're in the survey mode and we're gonna look at the images and and you notice that I'm looking at set of images that are similar to each other so that I can look through and say, okay, what images do I want to collect from the set? Now, in keeping with the rule for no distractions, one of the distractions is your keyboard, and so I'm using these kind of keyboard shortcut replicators here. This one specifically is what I use when I'm selecting because it just fits in my hand, and I could feel my way to the keys. This is very easy for me to do all of my selecting instead of going and looking for a keyboard shortcut here on my keyboard, so when I looked down and look for a keyboard shortcut, I'm wasting time, so I'm just feeling my way toe on this on this shuttle pro, and so as I do that you're going to see me working over here with my hand over here and the shuttle pro, too is very easy, tio command it's very easy to program, and you simply go up to the top once you've installed it, there's a little, a little dial looking thing when you click on that dial, it gives your options and you can whatever program you're in, if you have thirteen of those options, you can change the keys thirteen different ways I have two one for the developed mode and one for the library mode, and so in the library mode, what these do is this, so I'm gonna I'm gonna look att images, and one of them is pick and so I want this image I want to zoom in on it, see if it's sharp, yeah, it's sharp so I can pick it, and if I like it a lot, then I'll give it a star and I'm just pushing buttons here by feel I like this one this one's important because there's a lot of family, family heirloom type stuff and then a tiffany bag and so we'll pick that one. I'm not super super, super fond of it, so I'm just going to pick it. I need something of the dress, but my memory tells me I've got much better pictures of the dress hanging, so I only need one shot of this, so I'm just going to look for a shot where it's on the bed, I've got the gun, a general bad look, and I think that one is probably the right one and I'll just zoom in and make sure that yep, okay, so I'm going to pick that one and then I'm going to move on and look, and I've got better details of this too, so your memory is going to help you in selecting images because you know what you shot, which is why it's very important for the photographer to actually do the selection, I'm absolutely fine with the idea of outsourcing the adjustment of images but the selection of images absolutely the job photographer because he's the one that knows what was shot so then once I've selected the images that air here and notice how many did I look at so I'm looking at eight photos that in my peripheral vision but how many days actually look at one two three so I chose the one that looked like the best appropriate images and I zoomed in to make sure they're sharp they were I picked him done so instead of scrutinizing eight I scrutinized three which means I saved a lot of time and then I'm just going to push a button that's actually performing a macro and when I push this it's going to select the next six s o we're going to want to be off limits I'm gonna push this button but we want to actually be on the monitor when I do this so I'm gonna click it and it just chooses the net you see how did that so I don't have to be involved in the process of choosing because otherwise I would be clicking on the next image and then scrolling over and then shift and then clicking to that one in order to get you know everything to come online which is it's just not a fun way to go I don't want to do that so instead all I have to do is push the button and it does it for me now how does it do that? Well, basically, what it's doing is it is first light room has an interesting way of reacting it's different it reacts differently to keystrokes and different modules are in different views, so if you're in the survey and you hit command and the arrow see it's shifts between the photos that you already have selected but if you go into the grid and you hit command and the arrow hold on option the arrow there ago it's option an arrow sorry if you had option and narrow it goes from whatever you have selected so let's say we have that selected option an arrow it goes to the next one over from that selection and then if you hit shift an arrow it adds to the selection and then go back to the survey and they're all available too. So now watch if I push this button it's doing all that really quickly all right, so I don't have to do that. The computer can do that for me so I used to have this program where it would do all of that inside of the survey mode, but the problem that I found was that if I had the second monitor open, it had to do a lot of squirrely stuff like it was constantly going between all of those as it was doing it because it was paying attention to what you were doing and so it slowed it down because the graphics card had to keep up with the animation. And so I went to this method where I go to the grid and then I do that and then I go back to the survey so the second monitors and get slowed down now so you can actually use this with second monitor open and the second monitor doesn't chugged the whole system down so it's actually updated from the older version so and I sell the settings toe for this online at platte store dot com and so you khun you can go on purchase him and just plug him in and then and then and then it's very easy to edit them you could just come up here click on the little dial menu, hit the shuttle settings and then that's how you change them so it just shows you the button so like this button right here the red button you can see what it's doing it's hitting g that it's sitting right than a sitting shift, right? Right, right shift right shift right shift right then it's not rocket science it's just just I did it for you so just saves you sometime. Okay, so um I am going through the process than of looking at these images so I'm going to scroll back here tio here and I'm gonna click on this image and hit my button selects my images I like this one with all the clutter not all that intrigued with that one so I will zoom in pick that one and then I'm going teo I need one of these here and I think I like this one so I'm gonna zoom in and make sure that my yeah that's sharp pick it and give it a star on dh then sure I'm all that keen on that one, so I will just push my button I like this one notice we already chose one of these files before, but if I like this one better, I can pick it and then I'm always going to get a second pass when I come back into the develop because when I'm developing, I'm only looking at the images I've selected and at that point these two images that I've already chosen will be closer together and so at that point, I can reject one out, but there's no point in me going back right now to try and un select something. No, I picked that I'd better go back and un selected don't do that's a waste of time going backwards just wait for the time that you're in the developed module and at that point you can reject it out I obviously want to detail this, so I picked that I'll take a I'll take a gardener, please uh I like this little shot of her holding the mirror she's checking what she looks like a she's being made up here's some more options on that I think I've got what I want so I'm fine and notice that I'm not over complicating the whole process and saying oh well I've got tohave I've got to re look at all of my images I can I can't just trust that that's good enough I'm not going to go re look at all the images try compared this one to the last two that I looked at if one was good enough I'm fine with it so go to the next set look here I like I like this one a lot here summon a zoom and make sure that the little stone a sharp and give it to start like that one a lot go the next set so I'm just kind of skimming through him and looking for things that jump out at me and that the important thing about this process is that you're allowing things to jump out at you and if they jump out at you then they're going to jump out of your client if they don't jump out at you and you have to convince yourself to put them in that's a it's a sure thing that you fines are going to be all that interested in that picture if you have to convince yourself now there is there is one exception to that and that is so I put in images that air striking and emotional and beautiful or they're historically important those are the two reasons they go in now I'm not a food photographer and so food photographer operates a quite a bit differently for food photographer you're gonna have a number of shots you're going to scan through me you go look for the ones with sharp where the food looks appetizing where the light's hitting it right and that's when you're going to choose and then the rest of it on the cutting room floor that's what you're going to dio for a uh for a wedding photographer I'm looking for emotions I'm looking for beautiful compositions and stuff like that but then I'm also looking for oh she needs a picture of grandmother now I may not have an amazingly beautiful picture of grandmother but I need one of grandmother's so I will accept whatever comes through um and so those are the two criteria on which I select images is whether or not it's beautiful or whether it's historically important and so sometimes that convinced myself on the historically important but but I will I will look at the historically important images and then I will choose the very best one of those and then let the other ones go because I want whatever historically important images I'm bringing in I want them to be definitely amazingly good in comparison to the other ones so I'm I'm still going to follow the state method it needs to jump out at me from all the other not as good historically important images you know, like uncle jim that happen to come to the wedding and we've got a snapshot of him well, snapshots aren't beautiful, but you might have five of him choose the one that really jumps out in comparison to the others and at least you'll have the best of those so that's in in keeping with that rule that says that we're going to be doing this by gut instinct and trust what we're accomplishing trust our trust, our instinct ok, alright, so peaky is the pick yuhas unpick taxes reject but notice that I've never hit reject reject is not for selecting images you select images in you don't reject them out because no one well maybe someone shoots at selects the majority of what they shoot. But if that's the case that's a strange situation in most cases ninety nine percent of the world shoots mohr and they they select less so they usually select a small percentage of what they shoot. Even a food photographer is going to shoot a lot more than a select just like one shot of the plate, but they're going to shoot twenty or thirty shots of the plate until they get the right whatever so even like landscape photographers, you're not you're not going to be selecting everything you shoot, you're gonna be selecting a small percentage because we were as photographers were actually more often wrong then we're right, right? Is that your experience? That's my experience I think that's everybody's experience way we take chances and then we sometimes get it right and those of us who work really hard in our art get it right more often than those who aren't as good at art and so that's just the way we are all right, so you'll notice that I've only picked them haven't rejected as I'm doing this I'm adding stars so as I go through and I look at a set of images and I say, oh, I really like, you know this this shot and I zoom in to see that it's sharp I like it and I pick it and then I give it two stars if I really like it now notice that this one is the same as another one, but I picked this one because this one is focused on the dress the other one was focused on the the the perfume, and so I don't know which one I want to use in an album um I need the earings zoom in oh, you know, what's happening this is a great opportunity for a little lesson here I'm gonna click here and I'm trying to drag and nothing's happening, but if I click over here and drag something's happening so somehow light room thinks that there's a window open right here yeah, so the system thinks that there's seen it thinks that there I can't zoom in can't zoom out, but if I click over here I can zoom out so somehow light room and apple together think that there's a window open right now and so in order to do that if you ever have that happen, which is very rare but when it does it's annoying you just simply quit and then go back and start it up again and the window gets cleared I've never been a but now I'll see it'll zoom in over there so just a weird little glitch inside of I don't know if it's a light room thing or if it's ah system thing but so I also like these now in this case notice that my selection cause I'm selecting six at a time went over so then I can simply come in here and click on this one and then add to that selection so when I do that there's this is an important distinction if you are selecting if I click on the image itself the primary selection moves but the overall selection actually stays the same if I want to specifically choose an image and unsolicited all the others I'm going to hit the frame I click the frame watch watch the others will do that selection disappears so that's telling it that I only want to select that specific image and so with that then I can simply push my button again and add the six or I could held the shift button down and then click over to this one and it would adam all so I khun specifically choose this set so that I could decide you know which of these images I want zoom and make sure it's sharp pick it and then move on to the next set all right, so all four of those rules have been in play then I've only been picking not rejecting I've been looking at images together not one at a time like this I've been looking at them in the survey mode I've been doing them without distractions because I have been looking at my keyboard I've been using a keystroke replicator here that I could feel my way to I've been looking at him and serve a mold where there's not a lot of distractions and I don't have twitter and facebook going crazy on man pinging and I'm not answering e mails and talking some on the phone I'm working and doing my thing to select okay so that that that and I'm not second guessing myself because I do that so that is the process of selection now any questions out there before we move beyond that? Yeah for sure okay, so right off the top of that would like to know if she was two use reject does rejecting delete a photo no rejecting keeps the photo it just adds, like, for instance, let's say that I don't like this photo and I hit the reject, which is the ex key it just puts a little flag on it you can see that little black flag right there and you could see it better if I right click this and turn this to a white background see that black flag by the way, you can change this to any color you want just right, click it, change it to black I like it black so the pictures show up, but occasionally you can't see the black flag, which I don't really care about because I don't use the reject key I used the picky which gives me a white flag so it shows up really nice against the light are of the black yeah, nice quick question about the replicator, the shell a pro so I have that and I upgraded it. You know, it hasn't upgrade the set of instructions that you have that little workout yes. So did you upgrade yours? Yes. Okay, so there's there's a new version of the of the driver on dh so that driver because the new driver doesn't read the old driver versions and so if you have purchased that in the past all of my presets are infinitely downloadable and so you go back to this place where you bought them and you log in and then you khun download the new versions and that's true with all my presets to did you know that it's all my presets whenever I update a set of pre sets I just put him up online and so then you can go on log back in and re downloaded so if I like, for instance, the new flight five came out and so I made sure everything was upgradeable to write five and it's all available on there so anytime you purchase presets any time I update those pre sets that that's particular collection it's always downloadable and so you just have to download the new version three which is on there right now so yeah it's just it's just for some reason they didn't make him upgradable and then the current pre sent you have also worked with larry five. Yeah, yeah. Um so anyway, any other questions out that we do, we do thank thanks, jarrod jail food would like to know if you know if is there a shuttle version for the pc the shuttle works on pc or mac great and and it just has a different drivers the driver's operate a little differently I don't sell anything for the pc because I don't own a pc, which means that I can't make one but I I've been thinking about buying a pc just so I could make them for it, but I just never you know I have to go buy a pc and it's almost like I am changing religions I feel like dirty about it or whatever and so but you know whatever I don't feel don't feel that everybody gets some okay? Yeah so sarah hd and erin g would both like to know what is the shortcut and survey mode to see the next six the next six photos is there a so if there's not a shortcut it's a serious of shortcuts so it's actually it's actually g and then option right arrow and then shift right arrow six time or five times and then end got it that was brilliant the way you rewind that and watch that over and over again. Yeah, so cool. Thank you you about um okay and that's for mac p c I I don't know if it's option in or maybe ault arrow or something like that that's a whole different religion yeah that's right um okay, so once we've done our selections then our job is to congregate those selections now in our case we've selected a very, very small subset of images so if I go if I if I bring in my if I go to the grid and bring up the library filter and you notice that I was in the survey mode and when I hit the backslash key it actually brings up the the library filter but puts you in the grid mode because that's the only way you can see it on dh then once I'm there if I sort by attributes and I look for flagged images there's the images I'm gonna deliver the client now obviously we would want to deliver more than this because we never even got to like the portrait's and whatever so eh so I'm going to then take these images here and highlight the whole set and I'm going to go over to this raw folder here so again this is this is the actual folders inside of the inside of the hard drive and if I write click that and I create a new folder inside of it that allows me to have dialog box where I'm going to call this select and I'm gonna put include these photos into that folder so then when I hit create they're going to go and see other in that folder now so it created a folder and if I write click that folder and show it in my finder you can see that they have been created here here's the selects folder and there's the photos that were put into it so we are we have now created a folder and we've moved photos but light room knows where they are because light removed it here's here's a warning if you go moving stuff around outside of light room light room don't know where it is so you want light room to do the moving and then light room will always know where it is so then there's no lost I moved my files and now I can't find them where are they? I don't know you should have moved him in light room and then light room would know where they are never to worry though if you didn't move photos and you can't find them like for instance let's say that I took this photo here and I right click it and I show it in the finder and I take that photo and I move it to here when I go back there's gonna be an exclamation point on it saying hey you move this photo didn't tell me about it where is it if I push that little button right there it asks me to locate it I can locate it go here and say it's right here and hit select and now it's going to show it to me as it's in this folder somewhere I don't I don't know where it's somewhere in here on dh. So now if I cert search by attributes, find it there it is it's right there, and so I could drag it back into that selects folder and now it's back where it belongs so you can find any folder or anyone photo simply by right clicking it or you can right click the folder itself and you can update the folder location or if there's an exclamation on a folder. Or I mean on a photo or there's a question mark on a folder, just simply right click it located and then tell it where it is, so you have to go find it. Sometimes I have some folders there only one level deep and and maybe I've moved from the and I go to synchronize it and it will not see at all in light room, the folders that are below it. I have tried it over and over, and I don't know why do you know why I've never seen you? You know that the photos were inside of that? Absolutely, I've never seen that just won't show up at all. I would be interested in seeing that that's an anomaly, I think s o you have your laptop and you can rig for tomorrow. Great so reproduce it in the morning tomorrow and then maybe we'll talk about it and say what happened? I'm sure it's something simple, but I'd have to see it in order to figure it out okay, so we have selects now in a folder and all of these then would be considered our rejects. These are the ones that we didn't select so therefore they are rejects that's why we didn't ever have to put the reject key because we never have to reject something to see it as a reject on unsolicited image is a reject so now I can right click the raw holder again and create another folder inside it and this time we'll call it two thousand thirteen o nine oh three uh underscore altman score wedding notice that I'm I'm naming at the same name as the folder of the job and then I'm putting ar e j for rejects on it and that's the folder that's literally going to move over to the rejects drive and disappear so now I can not include the photos so I don't want to include any photos in it and hit create now it created a blank folder that's on the hard drive just waiting for something to be put in it and then I can click on the untitled folders and shift click toe I got all of them and then just grab him and drag him in there. And now I have a rejects holder and a select folder. If I right, click the raw holder and I showed in the finder. Now you can see that my organizational structure has been cleaned up. Now I have my rejects and my selects, all right there. And then in the rejects folder, you can see that it's moved the entitles. So light room doesn't really good job cleaning things up and it's, all based on what you're doing here. And I'm not using my collections to do that. I'm using my folders to do that. So it's all organized through level.