A few winters back, I was photographing on a high mountain pass. Low clouds and scattered sun danced across the snow-covered slopes, blown by a chill wind from the north. The view below came and went as fog blew past, opening and closing the scene like curtains. Enthralled, I snapped photos of the stark mountains, the pale sun, the glowing patches of light on the snow.
These shots are going to be awesome, I thought to myself.
A few hours later, I opened my computer and downloaded the images. I could see right away that they were indeed awesome! I sat and stared, certain that these were some of the best shots of the trip. The way the light played across the mountains, the storm light on the rock and snow slopes; yeah, it was great.
But a week later, as I was putting together images from the trip, I revisited those photos. Huh, I thought, I could have sworn those shots were better. I mean, they’re decent, but they’re not extraordinary. What happened?
I soon realized that the difference had to do with emotional distance. My initial assessment of the photos was clouded by the intensity of my feelings – but after spending time away from the files, I could separate myself emotionally from the experience of making them.
In other words, after a week, I could view those shots almost as though someone else had made them. As a result, many more of the photos ended up in the “delete” pile than I would have originally expected.
What I’m getting at here is that culling your photos is hard. Getting that emotional distance, thinking about what makes one photo great and another photo lackluster, determining how to reject some of your hard-won images – it’s a struggle for practically all photographers, including seasoned professionals.
Fortunately, there are certain steps you can take while reviewing your images to ensure that you keep (and reject) the relevant photos, which is what I discuss in this article. So without further ado, here are the five steps to follow as you cull and assess your images.
Step 1: Check the technical details
After importing the photos of a recent shoot into my Lightroom Catalog, I like to look at each image quickly – at full-screen size – and assess each for any technical faults.
I ask myself a series of questions:
Is the image out of focus (I check this at 100% or 1:1 view)? Is the composition obviously wonky? What about exposure; is the exposure so wrong that I can’t correct it?
If the answer is “Yes” to any of these questions, I immediately delete the image (or flag it as a reject by hitting X) and move on to the next file.
I encourage you to do the same here. Give each file a full-screen look, and do a technical assessment.
The trick in this first step is not to go beyond the technical details. This is not the time to try and gauge overall image quality. It’s just about deleting the obvious screw-ups.
Step 2: Do a second pass
If I’m eager to spend some time with my photos or I’ve got a deadline, I’ll do a quick second pass, where I go through the shots again soon after completing Step 1. Lightroom and many other image-organization programs offer the ability to flag images with different colors and/or rating codes, and I like to use this to give my files a more detailed evaluation.
Scrolling through my images, I color-code the good and bad standouts. Images that I like get coded green, purple, or blue (the color relates to my personal filing system). Images that I don’t particularly like, for one reason or another, get flagged red.
Some images do not get flagged at all. These are usually images about which I’m ambivalent. They are good enough not to get the dreaded red flag but not so good that I want to highlight them immediately.
At this point, I’ll start post-processing my favorite shots, but I won’t delete anything – that comes later!
I think this second pass is important for identifying the really solid photos from the mediocre and unimpressive shots, but I’ll also note that you can push this step until after Step 3 or Step 4, depending on the scenario and what works for you.
(One more tip: The color coding I do doesn’t need to match your own color coding! You can use a red-green-uncoded system if you like, or you can add in additional colors for more nuanced coding, or you can work with a flag/no flag/reject flag approach. The important thing is that you’re evaluating your images a second time and identifying files based on more than basic technical quality.)
Step 3: Let your photos rest
As I mentioned in the introduction, immediately following a shoot, we get emotionally caught up in our images, for better or for worse. If a shoot goes well – like my experience on the mountain – you may have the feeling that your images are better than they actually are. If a shoot goes poorly, on the other hand, you may feel like all your images suck (when, in fact, they may not!).
The solution is to give the images some space. Pull back for a few days, don’t look at them, don’t edit them. Put your new photos out of sight, and give yourself some emotional distance from the experience of making your images.
After a few days, a week, or even longer, you can continue with Step 4 (or Step 2, if you haven’t yet done your second pass).
Step 4: Consider how your images will be used
Now it’s time for your next pass. You’ve had some time away from your photos, and you’re ready to look at them with fresh eyes.
As you dive back into your collection, review each shot – but with a focus on how the image will be put to use. If you are shooting for a client, then you may already have a good idea of the kind of images you need to deliver.
For example, the conservation groups I work for usually provide me with a brief on the project. In that document, they will note specific types of images or video they need. As I’m pulling selections for them, I’ll consider their requirements and put special effort into finding and editing images that match.
Usually, however, I don’t have clients telling me which images are best, or which images I need to deliber. Without anyone guiding me, I lean toward variety.
When I first started shooting seriously, I saved almost every image. I was too attached to each one. Later, as my image catalog and hard drives began to swell, I became heartless with images, deleting all but one or two from a series, even good alternatives to my selects. Now I’ve settled somewhere in between because I don’t always know how an image will be put to use, so I like to have some variety available.
Magazine editors will often be looking for images with big areas of negative space that can accommodate text. Big wall prints require images that are immaculately sharp and high resolution. Illustrative shots, often sold for stock or for small use in publications, need to be tight with only the bare minimum of room around the subject.
While editing, I plan for these eventualities. I like to select four or five images featuring a variety of compositions from any given scene, but not more.
As an example, below are my five selects from an encounter with a brown bear in Southeast Alaska. Each of the five images has been published in national magazines, and each time, the editor wanted the image for a different layout – some involving text, some as a simple stamp-size illustration.
The bottom line is you never know what is going to appeal to different viewers, so it’s important to keep a group of images with some diversity. Don’t just pick the one photo you think is best and then reject the rest.
Again, don’t get caught up on what you see as the best image from a series. Rather, give thought to how you might want to use images from the shoot in the future. Red code (or however you tag your images) the faulty ones, or near-duplicates, but retain some variety in the greens/selects pile.
Step 5: Do one final check
By this time, your collection of images will be a checkerboard of red and green. The red images are flagged for deletion, and the greens (and other colors) are set aside as keepers.
If you are like me, you’ve created enough duplicate, failure, and screw-up files that the reds wildly outnumber the greens and unlabeled images.
Before I hit “delete,” I give each image one more look – just to make sure I’m not cutting something that I might want to keep. Sometimes if an image is unique, even if it’s not what I think of as “good,” I’ll hold onto it.
More than once, I’ve scrolled back through my Lightroom catalog and stumbled on an image that, for one reason or another, I never gave a close look. At the time I created it, I must have considered it unremarkable but didn’t consider it bad enough to delete. Years later, I’ve found some gems in those un-flagged images.
How to cull your photos: final words
Selecting keepers from a series of images is not always as straightforward as it seems!
What is “good” and what is “bad” is subjective, and it can change depending on your emotional distance and the purposes for which an image might be put to use. Consider each image carefully and use your delete key as needed, but don’t get too enthusiastic pushing that button. Deleted images can never be recovered, after all!
Now over to you:
How do you approach image culling? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
