7. ITERATIVE CULLING IN LIGHTROOM

THE SINGLE MOST tedious task when you’re importing pictures in Lightroom is separating bad pictures from good ones so that you can come up with a plan for editing them. This process is known as “culling,” and it will probably take you the longest out of everything you do in Lightroom. I spend a lot of time talking to people around the world about their use of Lightroom, and this part of the process seems to be the part people struggle with the most. To that end, I want to share with you a technique I use that I borrowed from my days as a teacher. I call it “the iterative edit.”

Think back to when you were a student in school taking a test. If the test was timed and consisted of multiple choice questions, the best strategy for completing it was to go through the questions as fast as you could, answering all the questions that you knew were correct. If at any point in time you got to a question that you did not know the answer to, the strategy was to skip the question. In doing so, you could focus your attention on all of the answers that you did know and get those completed first. You could then double back through the test and have more time to work on all of the questions that you didn’t answer on the first pass.

Skipping the unknown questions also gives you a better chance at getting them right because you can pick up any context clues for answers from the other questions in the test.

Let’s apply this strategy to our photography. If you have a shoot that contains 200 pictures, there is a good probability that a portion of those pictures are either really good or really bad. By bad, I mean things like the image is out of focus, a subject’s eyes are closed in a portrait, or you cropped the photo and cut off a head. These are things you immediately know are problems and you would never spend any time working on this image. Conversely, when we’re looking for good pictures at this point, we’re not trying to pick the very best picture out of the very best series here. We’re looking for pictures that are okay—the image is exposed, composed, and includes the whole subject. How you rank those pictures will be something you decide later on.

Go to the beginning of the shoot and double-click on the first picture in the Grid View. I don’t want anything to interrupt me from this part of the process, so I turn off all of the panels immediately surrounding the picture (Figure 7.1). You can do this by clicking on the arrow in the corner of each panel, or by using the keyboard shortcut Shift-Tab.

Another great way to minimize distractions is to dim the Lightroom interface so that it is not visible. Press the letter L on the keyboard, and you’ll see that the Lightroom interface dims by about 80 percent (Figure 7.2). Press the letter L again, and the interface darkens completely. This is known as the Lights Out display mode. Don’t worry, pressing the letter L again will bring the interface back, and pressing Shift-Tab again will bring back all of the panels for you. The key here is to get rid of all of those distractions so you can focus on flagging images that you know you will never use and marking images that you want to rank later.

Take a look at the first picture in the series and give yourself about half of a second to decide: am I throwing this away or am I keeping it for later? If you’re throwing it away, press the letter X to mark it as Rejected (Figure 7.3), and you will automatically advance to the next picture. If you’re keeping it, press the letter P to mark it as a Pick, and you will move along to the next picture. If Lightroom does not advance you to the next picture, go to the Photo menu and select Auto Advance (Figure 7.4).

Invariably, you’re going to get to a spot where it’s difficult to make a quick decision as to whether or not you need to keep a specific picture. If you hesitate for more than just one second, I would suggest you skip the picture by pressing the letter U or moving to the right with your right arrow. These are the test questions that we do not know the answer to, so move on.

Figure 7.1 Press Shift-Tab to get rid of the panels in Lightroom.

Figure 7.2 Turn down the lights with the Lights Out display mode in Lightroom (keyboard shortcut L).

Figure 7.3 Press the X on your keyboard to mark an image as Rejected and advance to the next image in the shoot.

Figure 7.4 Turning on Auto Advance in Lightroom.

Continue to work through the series of pictures until you get to the end of the shoot. At the end of this process, you will have three sets of pictures: pictures you know you need to delete immediately, pictures you need to rate, and pictures you need to go back to (Figure 7.5).

In Grid View mode, you can use the Library Filter at the top of the window to filter out the picked and rejected images, so that you see only the unflagged pictures (Figure 7.6).

Now you can start the process again, using X, P, U, or the arrows to run through this second series of pictures. You’ll find that you get through these pictures a lot faster than the original take because you will have the benefit of having seen all of the pictures that come before and after these questionable shots. Whereas during the first pass, you may have been unsure about whether you wanted to keep a picture or delete it, you can now make a more confident decision because you know whether there is another picture that is better. This can make you more willing to delete a picture.

In order for this to work, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of not doing anything else. If you stop to see whether or not a picture would look a little bit better with some exposure, you’ve broken the workflow. It does require a certain level of discipline to get through this part of the process. But I can guarantee you that if you stick with this, it will make things a lot easier for you later on.

Once you’ve filtered out all of the pictures you don’t want to work on, you can then go back to the picked images and create some sort of order by which you would want to edit your shots. You can use star ratings to flag the best images of the series. In my case, I tag all of the pictures that I’m going to submit to a client with five stars (Figure 7.7).

After I’ve gone through all of the picked images and given them star ratings, I use the Library Filter to display only the five-star shots, and then I decide which of those pictures needs some editing in Photoshop. Those pictures usually get a red flag (Figure 7.8).

At the end of this process, I have a clear idea of which pictures I’m going to keep, which ones I’m going to edit in Lightroom, which ones I’m going to need to bring into Photoshop, and a good consolidated series of pictures that don’t have any garbage attached to them.

We can definitely work a lot clearer like this.

Figure 7.5 This is what your folder will look like in Grid View after you’ve completed your first pass culling the pictures.

Figure 7.6 The Library Filter allows you to filter out specific pictures. I’ve filtered out the picked and rejected images, so only the unflagged images are visible. Above the filmstrip you can see how many images there are in each category (45 out of 197 images are unflagged).

Figure 7.7 Once the take has been pared down further, I’ll add star ratings and colors based on my workflow.

Figure 7.8 Filtering the images by five-star shots that are also labeled with a red flag.