RAW processing

[bikingbadger]

Sure this has been asked and did a search through the forums but didn't quite come up with an answer. I have decided to take the plunge and shoot in RAW. This may give me more control so time will tell. My problem seems that when take photo's and upload them after a day there may be 50 photo's. Now I want to speed things up in the processing but each photo may need different settings so how do you go about working through so many photo's.

[ravncat]

Start by getting good at culling. Flagging good photos and tossing bad ones away becomes more important, so as not to waste effort on images that won't be used . Gotta get critical on yourself.

Everyone deals with the workflow differently. I find not much difference in processing speed between working with jpgs in photoshop and with raw files in lightroom.

[bikingbadger]

Thanks for the quick reply. I do quite a bit of culling and usually end up with a few photo's. I probably need to simply get better at working on a process of handling photo processing. I reckon I spend to much time wasting on finer details that should only be done on the keepers. Even though what would be your way of batch processing?

[ravncat]

I generally don't batch process - I might select a group of images to apply a white balance to, or a color profile to based on what light they were shot in, but I generally use LR, and go through two passes of selection - at separate times, once with a color, and once with a flag, then i see which ones were selected both times...

I have alot of processing to catch up on, but usually I try to narrow a shoot down to one best image, and a few really good ones. Hopefully some others will chime in about their batch processing methods.

[ElCapitan]

I second the culling of images. I went on a drive the other day and ended up with about 200 images. Most of the images were of the same few subjects, but were of different exposures and angles. After looking at them all, there only about 10 or so that were my absolute favorites, so I only worked on those images in the RAW processor.

The only time you can really batch process effectively is when you have a series of shots that were all done under the same lighting and used the same exposure. This way, when you are focusing on on photos, you can know that all the other photos should be getting about the same treatment. There may be areas that got a little too bright or dark, etc, but you can either adjust these really quickly in your RAW processor or just make the minor adjustments in PS.

[bikingbadger]

So batch processing is not really something to be looked at. I see the logic in it as it takes the whole power of taking RAW away. I will get my culling done. Do you simply delete these images or save them to another place to go back to later. Obviously some images that have the from the same subject at the same angle you can pretty much cull to one or two. If after the cull you have five out of twenty that are real keepers and the rest maybe's do you still delete those? Interested to know what you do with all the extra un-developed photo's?

[ravncat]

some people delete them, I save them, except for the obviously horrible mistakes... I use external hard drives for storage and backup. You're tastes may change in the future, I revisit my work from time to time for learning or to see if I missed something, maybe a crop, maybe something that is good that I thought was poor at the time.

[baycruisers]

Sometimes there's something potentially useful in a shot that might otherwise be of little interest, such as a particularly nice sky. I have a folder of skies that I can use to replace cloudy or blah skies in shots. I don't use them often, but they're nice to have.

[bikingbadger]

I am also thinking about saving them as I am still learning and might in the future be able to save some of them. I use picassa for meta data is there and GIMP for editing. Is there any other recommended program's for metadata for files or at least organization?