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Culling Images

all right now we're getting into one of my favorite concepts, and I still haven't done this. But I would just love the hang over people's shoulder as they're working through their images like, Why did you choose that? One is better. What about that one? Isn't that a good one? Why don't you think this one is better than that? In seeing how people edit their own images? I think there's a wide re way of doing a wide variety of ways of doing this. I do think there are some ways that are a little bit better and worse, but it's a very personal choice that we make, how we look at our images and how we decide which ones we keep and which ones we move on with. So a big question that you have to ask yourself, What do you satisfied with? You know what you want in your final images, and so that's what we're gonna be talking about is think about what you want to go through in 10 years from now, when you look at tomorrow's shoot, what sort of images do you want to be in there? How many images do you...

want to be in there. What are they gonna be organized like? So before you get into this, try to set up a good work environment. Whatever that ISS, you don't want to be stressed. You don't want to be rushed. You want to be comfortable in your environment for me. I gotta have a clean desk. I can't have a lot of other paperwork hanging around. I wanna be able to just concentrate on this without any other distractions around with white room hanging Lang rooms a little bit slow these days. And so I want a pre load my images. And so what will happen is I'll go out, shoot, I'll download it. Light room will start building previews. And depending on how many pictures I shot, that might take some time. And so I always usually try to Russian start the download. Okay, Now I'm gonna go unpack the gear. I'm gonna grab a bite, e take a shower, come back down when the computer has done all its work and everything's ready to go at 100%. I want to be able to speed through my images and see things very, very clearly the time separation. There's some good and some bad. Sometimes you need to go through images right after you shot because you remember something being better about one situation, one photo, then the next. But it also helps just toe Wait a few weeks, sometimes months, to come back and look with fresh eyes at what you shot. Because sometimes you're very emotionally involved in what happened. It throws off your rating system. And so I think that my my travel editing is probably better to better than my standard editing. Because when I travel, I always go through and take a look at what I shot that day. And I just want to get a quick edit. Just give me some two star images. I just want to see you know what workout that day, 10 minutes and I'm off to bed. But then, when the trips all done two weeks, three weeks later, I get a come back, and now I have the whole picture of the trip in mind and I go back to that day and I go, Oh, there was a gem. I messed and I thought this one was good, but it's not. I have got another one following day. That's much better. And you can emotionally detach yourself from the situation. And this is why newspapers and magazines had photo editors. They never went out and shot. All they did was just edit other people's work. They go, Hey, I don't know what you dealt with when you were there, but this is what we needed and this didn't work out or this did work out. And there are people that can look at your work and just tell you what's good and bad, even though they weren't there. And that emotional separation is sometimes necessary. And when it's yourself, sometimes it's time that will help you separate yourself from that situation. What's your plan? What's your goal when you have all your images? And so I think of it is okay, I got a mound of images and I would like to figure out what is the best and get rid of the worst. All right, now there's gonna be a clump leftover, but how big, deep clumped you want in the best. And how much do you want in the least? How much time do you want to spend? Are you gonna spend two hours doing this. Do you want to try to do this in 15 minutes? It's gonna make a big difference on how you go through him. And so just set yourself a time estimate of what you're going to dio and you know where all these images were going to go and so that you kind of have a plan. Because I know all of us have kind of got stuck looking through photos and have time get away from us and like, Wow. Okay. What was I doing? You know, you got to get a little bit more organized about this. If you want to be efficient about your time, If you have a lot of free time, bio means mingle through your images. That's great to Dio, but it's good to have a plan. So let's talk about eliminating and elevating images. And so, ah, lot of the images are gonna go. If you're gonna go with my one star system, just one basic image we're gonna get the worst in the garbage and the best two stars. Some of these might become three stars or more, but just that just separates him from the rest and We'll deal with them later, all right, The good old trash cans. Should we throw things in there? Why would we throw something in the trash can? Well, I throw things in the trashcan because they're out of focus, and there's a lot of things that could go wrong in the focusing. If you remember, back to the focusing section member are focusing Quiz all the different problems with focusing. And so there's a lot of things that can go wrong and focusing that I don't for see ever being able to be fixed. Maybe it will be in that would be really nice. Noise and lens sharpness are a couple of things that have Asterix down here, that we can do a little bit of adjustment and so don't throw it away quite yet if there's some noise because you might still need it and we might be able to resurrect that image from the dead. But there's a lot of things you know, if you don't have enough depth of field or you focused in the wrong spot. I really doubt that we're going to be able to fix that in any time in my foreseeable future and so you may capture an image that, you know, at the time, it was all that was a great moment. It's out of focus, you know, and it's disappointing when you get those good moments and they're out of focus. But you know what? I don't think that's ever coming back, folks. It's just not coming back. And so that's the time to really probably be sending that one to the trash can. Unfortunately, now I will take an aside here and say, I do have some personal images. I have my professional catalogue of photography and then I have personal pictures from my family in my history, and there are a few very out of focus photos. But those photos are a part of my history, and I have kept them. And so I'm not telling you that you have to delete all your out of focus pictures. But when it comes to your quote unquote good photography, out of focus pictures really don't have a place anywhere in a personal side. Yeah, there's a little aside, a little dark folder that you can file under an assumed name in the corner of your our drive. For those moments that you want to keep bad exposures, Asai mentioned. Before we can fix a lot of exposure problems, but if it's really really out of the park, you might say overexposed. Under exposed blown highlights shadows that don't have any detail. That might be a reason for deleting the photographs. Now there's a lot of adjustments that you can dio take this image here. This image is shot dark and we can go in into the exposure slider and we can brighten it up. And we can essentially fix this photograph, all right? And so we've just added three stops of exposure in post production, and cameras were pretty lenient. They'll while you to do that. Well, what if we took a photo that was correctly exposed? And then we looked at a little portion of the detail in the shadows? The picture that was properly exposed does not have nearly as much noise as the one that we've tried to raise the brightness by three stops in post production, and that's because it was too dark. There wasn't enough light there, and we're trying to bring up information that was never recorded in the original outset by the camera and so getting the right exposure is important. Now, if you really, really need the photo, yeah, you could do it and save it a little bit, but it's gonna be limited as to how much you can do with it. And so if you have a really bad exposure into the trash bin, it goes composition. If your composition is not right, there's a lot of empty space or there's crop elements that are really important in there. That might be a good reason for getting rid of that photograph as well. Now there's some things that you're gonna be able to just in post production, so don't be too quick to throw things away right away. One good thought is to put things destined for the trash, but don't empty the trash for a while. And so that's why I label things blue. And I keep him around for a while until I'm really sure that I want to get rid of them. So I'm not just deleting immediately. I'm just indicating I don't think I want these all right, some other distractions, secondary subjects that we didn't want in their unusual elements that just don't work with that particular subject. The background isn't right. There's distractions in the background. The eyes or clothes have conflicts. We have bright elements, and there's a lot of things going on in the background. Even though our subject looks fine. The background, it's so distracting. It is ruined the photograph. There's other, just awkward things going on. There's an unnatural pose. Just didn't look right. How many people, how many photographs ever taken with people with their eyes closed probably don't need those missing parts, Missing parts? You know what I mean by this? It just happened to be cropped out of the frame. We generally want to see all those parts of the body if it's in a situation like that. And so that's Ah, good photo to be deleted down the road, duplicate images. And so exactly the same image. So important. Concept, I think, is back in the days of film. Occasionally we had cameras that had a little tiny scratch on the film plate, and it would scratch the film, maybe just for one picture and so photographers at the time shooting film something great. Just take a bunch of photos just in case there's a problem with that piece of film in the development or something else. Nowadays, with digital, there is no real reason to shoot the same picture twice. Change something exposure, focus, composition. Do something different about it because we can copy photos very easily, So do something different. And so if you took 34 photos that are exactly the same, you can get rid of all those extras except for one. So those are all good reasons for eliminating photographs now. Why are you gonna rate things better? Why should they go up to two or three star image is clearly the best moment. If there's something that happens, that boy that was really the pinnacle moment that's gonna be good with Portrait's, it might be the best expression or breast gesture, maybe in landscape photography. It's when the light was actually the best. Or maybe it's just when you happen to get the camera in the right position to get the best composition. In some cases, you're gonna hit a conflict. Well, this one's better here, and this one's better here, and this other ones better here, and it's gonna be kind of a balance of all of those and how you're going to use your photographs. It's, you know, judging a beauty competition. You know, this one's winner here, this one's here. And so which one actually wins? The whole contest isn't necessarily the winner of any one of those particular categories. Sometimes I'll have a Siris of two star images, and one of them will get rated to three stars. It's not really a three star image, but I just needed, you know, every group of idiots needs a leader, even if it's not a leader on DSO. Sometimes I will have a two or three star image that isn't really a two or three star image. But I needed a winner out of this group because it's generally a good group that I'm gonna make use of in some way or another. Now, some common types of photography and things that I'm looking for. So landscapes, portrait and sports, or some pretty popular categories, and so in landscapes. I want to make sure that I have sufficient depth of field and that there's no notable distractions and I prefer great light. I'll take good light when I'll get it, but I'll take great light even more. Portrait's I'm really looking for those eyes. Small little gestures could be important and anything that seems kind of awkward out of place, the collar turned up or anything that just is going to draw the attention of something that you don't want to be drawn attention to. With sports, there's usually peak moments at on almost all types of sports looking for the eyes because it's essentially an action portrait. In some ways, if you're shooting in a sport with the ball is really nice to have that ball in the frame. And that gets to be really hard on sports, like like hockey or baseball, where we're talking about a very small object but not having that object in the frame. That's just one of the other people running around the field. But when the ball's in frame there at the peak of action, and that could be really important and it could be very hard to deal with the background because you have very little control over the background, but you do have control over it with the lens you choose and where you choose to shoot, all right, so in this whole concept of what goes down and what goes up. There's a lot of things that we need to think about in where it gets aerated, and in this case you may need to develop the image a little bit to figure out whether it's really worth it. And so, every once in a while I will do something that I know. I'm not supposed to dio my time. I'll do whatever I want, but you should go through and just edit your images and then finish him and then go start working on them. I can't help myself. I see an image, it's got potential and I want to bring it in and I bring it over into developed. Like if we crop like this and we just add this, I know you can become a three story, just need a little bit of help. And so sometimes I get excited and I don't think do things in order that you're supposed to. There's no rules on this, but in theory you should just edit quickly and then go back and develop, and there are a number of things that we're gonna improve on when we get into the developed section. But that was kind of my ideas on calling in how to choose images for deletion and rating higher