After the first post about workflow, I now have the photos in lightroom, and the default selection is the photos I have just imported. So now I am ready to work on it.

This part of the work is shamelessly stolen inspired from others, but it works for me so why reinvent the wheel.  I have several runs through the images, where I each run narrow them down and exclude the images not worth working on.

1. First run through is a very basic and quick run. By quick I mean I don’t use more than 5 seconds per image.

To start this, double click the first image from the day to get it up in a larger view.  For each photo I either pick or reject it. This is done by pressing “x” for reject or “p” for pick. That way it is marked with either with a black flag with an x in it, or a white flag.

If you press the capslock before starting this, you will automatically go to the next image once you have either picked or rejected the image.

I have multiple reasons for rejecting an image, it can be camera shake or horribly wrong exposure. Or whatever reason you can come up with.

Once you are done press “g” to get back to the overview.

2. Now I do one of two, either I delete the rejected photos right away, or I hide them for now. (Yes I do delete photos, there are no reason to keep irrelevant data, it just helps filling your harddrive).

If I choose to delete them, in the overview I press ctrl+backspace.

If I choose to just delete them now, I put on a filter to only show photos marked with “picked” flag. This is done in the “library filter” bar above the grid of photos. (see image)

3.  The next run through I mark the remaining images with 1-3 stars. Like the first run through I choose the first image and get it in a large view I then press the buttons 1-3 depending on the score I want it to have. (Pressing capslock, advance to the next image as well).

• 1 star mean; I might consider deleting them later on, but then again no. Not a great photo, but there might be a little documentary value in it.
• 2 stars mean; decent snapshot, but nothing more. I definitely don’t want to  delete it, but I also don’t want to spent a lot of time in post processing it. Maybe show it to parents/family as it shows some event.
• 3 stars mean;  I want to post process, it has potential to be shown to others once I am done with it.

Depending on how many photos I have, I hide the photos with less than three stars, in the same way as I hid the rejected photos.

4. Once this is done, I am now left with what I feel is worth working on. I now take a tagging round. I go through each photo with three stars and tag them with keywords.

I usually add place, names of the people in the photo along with event and subject of the image, and not least whatever strikes me as relevant for the photo. It can be either done either by typing keywords into the box on the right hand of the grid view, or by clicking the keyword list. I type in what I find obvious and then scroll through the list of keywords I already have to see if I missed something obvious.

I just realised you can have a hierarchy of keywords, which I have started to use. I don’t want many levels, but I have a top level keyword called “Location” and then in that category I have all locations I have tagged. This makes the overview in the keyword list a bit easier.

You can arrange the keywords in the list by dragging them around.

While I am tagging each photo I usually also go through the other information on them, giving them a title, maybe a caption if that is relevant and so on and so forth.  This seems like a tedious task, and it can be.  But the keywords will follow the photo later on, so doing it now is just going to save you time later on.

5. Once I am done with tagging all the photos I start post processing the most interesting one. I wont cover the post processing in this series.

6. After I am done post processing an image, I give it 3-5 stars (press 3-5 button),

• 3 stars mean; It didn’t turn out quite as good as I had hoped
• 4 stars mean; This is worth sharing with other people
• 5 stars mean; I should print this and hang it on the wall

This was a rather long run through my work flow. I hope you can get some inspiration. One of the things I think is good about the multiple runs through is that I see the images more than once, and already after the first run through I have an idea of what I like and what not. And sometimes this run through triggers something inside me which I feels but can’t explain.  The other comment is; this workflow is not set in stone. I don’t do it like this every time. Some times I am too eager to process one particular image and so on. But it is a good template for me.

Next time I will cover the export for the web phase of the my work flow.

Related posts

• Workflow pt 3: Exporting
• Workflow pt 1: Getting things into the computer

Tags: lightroom