How do you sort and rate with Lightroom?

Zascar

Just starting to use Lightroom and absolutely loving it. Can't believe I have not been using it for years. I love how I can fly through organising the photos and pick the best ones for enhancement.
Right now I have a first run through then, use x to reject the crap ones which I delete. Then I rate the ones I like. Mainly I rate: 3 for decent, 4 for very good, and a five it it was the best one or two.

Just wondering about how you guys do things and what the best advice is?

flyingsnail

Normally I make my first pass and just score everything from 1 to 5 and reject the ones I want to delete at the same time I mark pictures that I want to include in the final set red regardless of the 1 to 5 rating.

Then during the editing process I use green to denote files that are ready to go to photoshop and blue for the final images that are ready for export and yellow as a place holder to remind me to do something else.

D.S.

I have a bit of a process where I:

- Run through a set of photos and mark them as either a pick or reject
- Run through them again and mark as 1-3 stars (have only felt proud enough of a few photos to get a 4)
- Will generally only process 2/3 star rated shots, and will mark all unprocessed photos as red.
- Will process and mark processed shots as green and will rerate or confirm rating (generally a photo doesn't get a 3 for me until it's a final product)
- I also keyword my pics by a range of items - style of shot (portrait, landscape, street), location, people, objects / subjects.

When I am creating a book or an image for printing. I use red and green for pending and final, but will use some of the intermediary colours to denote where it is in that particular workflow (e.g. yellow for processed but not set up for printing, and green for processed for printing / output medium).

I have a some smart filter folders set up where my 'best pics' (3 stars or greater) end up in a set of folders, and other sets end up. Some examples are a general 'best pics' folder (anything 3 stars or up), a landscape, portrait, and creative folder (composites). What I like about the best pics folders is that the longer I am at this photography gig, the more my tastes change and my standards change, and I find myself downgrading a whole host of 3 stars as time goes by, and it's the photos in these folders that increasingly become the gems.

Really keen to here how other people run their workflow.

Ben D Bus

1) Pick the ones I might process, reject the duds (missed focus, flash didn't fire etc), ignore the rest (the OK but unexciting ones)
2) Go through the ones I picked and give 3 stars to what I think are the better ones from each set (I do mostly studio model shoots with several different looks & lighting setups)
3) Go through the 3 star images and mark some up to 4 or down to 2.
4) Final choice of the 3/4 star images are marked green for export to Photoshop.

Bacchus

I used to go through a rank 1-5 but I found it was too time consuming fine tuning what made the grade to be a 4 or a 5 (that's probably just me though). I find it easier to just say yes/no and not get bogged down with ranking photos on a scale.

My current process is now...
- Do a sweep through the collection a mark any shots that can't be salvaged as "reject". I then select all those and delete.
- On the second pass, I edit ones I like and mark them as a "pick" if I'm happy with them.
- At the end I do a final sweep through the ones I didn't mark as "pick" and delete them all if I'm still happy they are not "picks".
- I'm left with the photos I edited and am happy with. Export into low (web) and high (4k pixels on longest edge) quality JPGs.

Thinking about it, I probably should add another step to flag my favourites (e.g mark them with the green flag) but I've been happy with this flow for a good while now. It's not too time consuming and I find I'm cutting more average photos that otherwise might have gotten a 3 out of 5 if I used a ranking system.

Ben D Bus

I forgot step 5

I sit and stare at my final selection until I find something wrong with it then deselect it