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Faster Culling Of Your Images

There’s a word you don’t get to use every day – culling (which to me means going through your images and making your picks, or star ratings or whatever you do to get down to the good shots). Anyway, this tip is to make that process a little quicker for you. One quick thing first:

One quick thing first:

Next Friday my Lightroom seminar is in Denver
Over 200 photographers are already signed up for the day – it’ll be over 300 by next Friday – don’t miss out – come spend the day with me. OK, onto the tip.

Above: When you’re going through your shoot, it’s likely it goes like this: you look at an image; give it a rating (or a flag, label, etc.), then you hit the right arrow key on your keyboard to move to the next image to rate it. Wanna save yourself a step? In the Library module, go under the Photo menu and choose Auto Advance (as shown above).

Above: Now when you flag, or star, or label an image it will automatically advance to the next image without you having to hit that extra right-arrow key. The whole process goes faster with fewer keystrokes, and when it comes to production. less is more.

Hope you found that helpful.

I’m up in Atlanta shooting with the Falcons this weekend (and photographing their new stadium well before the game on Sunday). Can’t wait it see it, and can’t wait to shoot me some football, and see my friends up in the ATL, and eat some Spray Cheese). Whoop, Whoop!

Best,

-Scott

P.S. If you haven’t seen Victor Fejes class on Advanced Photoshop: The Psychology and Science Behind Color Grading, it is amazing (you’ll learn a lot more than you’d think about color in general. Really cool stuff). I put the trailer below, but here’s the link to watch it right now – perfect class for this weekend.  

 

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10 comments

  1. Rob Grant 15 September, 2017 at 10:10 Reply

    Because of the lag in Lightroom I have switched to doing my culling in Photo Mechanic which is AMAZING! Blazing fast. I then export the keepers out of Photo Mechanic and import them into LR for the final editing. This has saved me a lot of time in my editing process. I do use the above mentioned auto advance tip while editing/tweaking the final photos and it helps. Unfortunately, until Adobe fixes the lag problem culling is no fun in Lightroom if you have large quantities of photos to review.

    • Samppa Toivonen 16 September, 2017 at 13:13 Reply

      This. I shoot sports almost exclusively.

      Only difference is I do not export anything from PM, I just add metadata and do picks. After that I ‘Add’ all photos to LR and I have all ratings and metadata done, just quick edits to picks in LR and export. This way I get JPG from camera to LR.

    • Darryl Yee 21 September, 2017 at 04:08 Reply

      I used to have that same workflow with PM but I found that culling images in LR in the Library module is almost as fast. Culling in the Develop module is painful. Try the Library module. Spacebar or Z to zoom in. I haven’t opened PM in a couple years.

  2. Meep 15 September, 2017 at 08:42 Reply

    Funny thing is culling is a word I tend to use everyday since it is by far the most time consuming and painful part of my workflow.

    There is nothing fast about culling in LR desktop. The lag for the next photo to snap into focus had driven me to do all my culling via LR Mobile on an iPad Pro. Even LR Web is faster than LR desktop for culling. I’ve tried all the various tips I’ve come across and nothing helps.

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