Kodak has introduced a new application, Kodak Professional Select. The app relies upon proprietary artificial intelligence to cull hundreds to thousands of images based upon technical attributes and aesthetic qualities.
Kodak states that technical attributes include color, focus, brightness, exposure, contrast and sharpness. With respect to aesthetic qualities, the AI looks for eyes being open, smiles and centered faces in your images. Kodak Professional Select then uses this data to select your best images and showcases them in an ‘easy-to-use interface.’ Importantly, the user maintains total control over which images are included in a final selection. The AI has been designed to drastically speed up this process. Kodak promises that ‘image culling is completed in minutes.’
Along with artificial intelligence, Kodak Professional Select allows the user to tag images with keywords, adjust the orientation, add star-based ratings, organize your files and more. You can learn more about Kodak Professional Select and see it in action in Kodak’s video below.
As you can see in the video above, to use Kodak Professional Select you must first sign up and install the required desktop application. This app interacts with Kodak’s cloud-based software. You then select and upload your images, which the software resizes for faster uploading and processing on the cloud. Once your images are uploaded, Professional Select goes to work and analyzes each image, ranking, and organizing your best images from the batch.
You can adjust how Kodak Professional Select prioritizes its evaluation criteria. Further, you can select how many images you desire from the batch. For example, you can prioritize exposure and sharpness and then select that you will want to keep 20 images from a batch of 500.
Kodak Professional Select judges images based upon multiple properties, including color, focus, contrast, and how the faces look in your images. Click to enlarge.
Once the analysis is complete, you will be able to adjust score criteria, add/remove selections, move images between groups, review images that the software determined were nearly identical and more. At this point, you can adjust the orientation of images, rate photos and add keywords. Once you’re all set with your selection, you export your selected images for the next step in your editing workflow.
Kodak Professional Select is compatible with Windows 10 and macOS Mojave (10.14.4) or newer and requires an internet connection. The following file formats are supported: DNG, JPG, RAW, TIF, CRW, CR2, CR3, RAF, 3FR, FFF, ARW, KDC, MRW, MOS, IIQ, NEF, NRW, ORF, RW2, PEF, X3F, SRF.
With its AI, Kodak Professional Select promises to make culling your images much easier and faster than traditional manual analysis. A free trial is available to try the software for yourself.
If you’d like to try Kodak Professional Select to see if it will fit in your workflow and speed up your image culling, there is a free 30-day trial available. After this trial, the ‘virtual assistant’ solution is available in monthly or annual subscriptions. Kodak Professional Select costs $ 29.95 USD per month. If you’d prefer a 12-month subscription, you pay $ 299.95, the equivalent of 10 months. To download the trial, head to Kodak Professional Select’s website.
The post Tips for Culling Images for Better Results and More Efficiency appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by John McIntire.
When it comes to a photographer’s workflow, there is one stage that might be more important than any other. It is the image selection process, also known as the culling stage. This critical stage is the point where you get your images into Lightroom (or other software) and start choosing which to work on.
But while this is the stage where you choose the photos that ultimately end up representing your work as a photographer, without systems in place it can turn into a huge time sink.
So focusing on the process of culling images can help speed up image selection significantly.
Being able to quickly whittle down a set of photos is an important skill for any photographer. At 36 images, this is a small set of photos, but the principles are the same whether it’s 36 images or 360.
This article aims to show you why having a good system for image selection can be beneficial to your photography and your portfolio. It will also provide an overview of a basic system that you can start to use in your workflow right away, and it will provide tips on how to use Lightroom’s built-in functionality for this purpose.
Note: My examples here are portraits, but the system applies to just about any genre in photography. There are instances where you might not be able to apply some of these principles and the criteria you apply in different genres will be different, but they are exceptions.
The forest for the trees
Take a moment to imagine that you’ve just finished a big session and imported all the images into Lightroom. Now you may have hundreds of images that you have to sift through to find the ones that you want to work on.
When you have hundreds of photos from a shoot all in one place, and test shots, outtakes, and misfires are still included, it can feel like a chore to go through them all.
Without a system for culling images in place, it’s all too easy to find yourself continually scrolling through the same set of images and reviewing the same ones multiple times. This may not be a problem if you only have a handful of frames, but once you get into larger shoots, you can waste a lot of time doing things this way.
Additionally, after going through the same images over and over again, it can also become discouraging. This makes it easy to give up and leave some gems unspotted, which are ultimately relegated to obscurity on your hard drive.
By using Collection Sets to divide a large shoot into ten outfit changes, the images become much easier to manage.
So what type of system can you create?
Using Collection Sets to divide up large shoots into smaller, more manageable chunks is a good place to start.
This is just a small reason why you should consider developing a system for your editing process.
Editing
The image selection process is also known as editing. Now, I know that the word edit (and editing) has come to mean something else in everyday vernacular for photographers. You can call it whatever you want, as I am not one to dictate or prescribe. But as you will be going about image editing in the future, consider thinking about your post-processing workflow in terms of these two job descriptions:
Photo (Picture) Editor: Someone whose job it is to select photos appropriate for the use in question.
Retoucher: Someone whose job it is to alter the appearance of photos and manipulate photos to achieve a final result.
Tools
Lightroom has a huge variety of tools that makes culling images easier. While this is not an exhaustive list, here are a few features that I use regularly:
Fullscreen Mode
Using Fullscreen Mode during the image selection process will help to remove any distractions from your screen. You’ll see the photo that you are evaluating and nothing else.
Being able to view a single image at a time makes this whole process go more smoothly. It also takes away the distraction of Lightroom’s standard interface on the screen. To enter Fullscreen Mode, select any single image in the Library Module and press the “F” key.
Compare
If you want to look at two similar images side by side, use the Compare feature in Lightroom.
The Compare feature allows you to look at two images side by side. Although you won’t use this until later in the selection process, it becomes very useful when you are trying to choose between two similar images with minor differences.
To use the Compare feature, select any two images in the Library Module and press the “C” key. To get back to your normal view, press “G.”
Reject
When you reject a photo in Lightroom, the image will be grayed out and marked by a black flag with an “X.” Any images you mark in this way should be recognizable at a glance.
If you follow my process, you are going to use this tool a lot. When you press the “X” key while any image is selected, you flag that image as a reject. This marks the image with a black flag with an “X” in the upper left-hand corner, and it grays the image out in the Library Module. This makes it very easy to see which images you have already reviewed and marked as unsuitable.
Pick
Marking an image as a Pick will annotate it with a highly-visible white flag.
When you are going through your images, you will eventually come across a photo that you love. You’ll know that you want to work on it no matter what.
In this instance, press the “P” key; the image will be flagged as a Pick. A little white flag icon will appear at the top left of the image in Lightroom.
Star ratings
Using the star ratings in Lightroom is another quick and useful way to annotate images that you want to review again later.
Because you will be going through your images multiple times, you can use the star ratings in Lightroom to mark any images you are unsure of or aren’t able to make a final decision on yet. You can mark them with one to five stars by using the corresponding number key. This makes them clearly labeled when you return to them in the future.
On being ruthless
Before we get into the actual steps of the editing process, there is one thing to discuss. Most everything outlined in this article can be changed up as required, but there is one thing that will be important for you to follow no matter what.
To make this process faster and more efficient, and to ensure that you are only left with your best images, you have to be ruthless. If something is not right about an image, reject it. If you have to think about it for more than a few seconds, reject it. If you have even so much as a niggling doubt, reject it.
Being able to quickly recognize obvious faults will allow you to reject images quickly. Overexposure, outtakes, reflections in glasses, cropped body parts, and awkward arm placements are some of the reasons these images were rejected at first glance.
A lot of the wasted time in this part of the workflow comes from hemming and hawing over an image for a length of time when the image doesn’t wind up getting used anyway. Make decisions fast. Be ruthless.
The system
Keeping the images you are working on separate from the rest will make this process go much more smoothly.
Now that you know the desired end result, you can get started with the actual process of image selection.
The first step is to isolate the set of images you are working on from everything else. There should be no distractions. If you are working on a set from a portrait session where there were multiple outfit changes, separate each outfit into its own folder.
In Lightroom, this is easy. You can create a Collection Set for your shoot, and then create a Collection for every outfit change inside that set. This will keep all of the images from a session in one place, but separated by things like outfit changes or lighting changes.
Criteria
Chances are that you already have preconceived notions of what you don’t like in photos. Whether these ideas come from things you’ve heard from other photographers or opinions you’ve developed yourself, it doesn’t matter. Knowing what these things are is going to help you speed through the process much, much faster.
Technical: Things that fall on the technical side are relatively easy to identify. What you are evaluating for here are things like focus, exposure, the absence of motion blur, etc. When you are going through your images, learn to identify technical faults at a glance.
Technical faults, like reflections in glasses, are easy to spot and make quick decisions on.
Aesthetic: This one is all down to your personal tastes. If you can figure out what you don’t like, then you can spot those things in an instant and rule the photos out of the selection process.
Don’t like when portrait subjects bring their hands to their face? That rules out any photos fitting that description. Don’t like it when catchlights appear in the whites of the eyes? You get where I’m going with this.
Aesthetic faults come down to personal preference and taste. Here, the eyes are dark and the pose isn’t the best.
The first pass
The goal of your first pass is to reject as many images as possible as fast as possible. If you can identify a reject at a glance and mark it as such, you won’t waste any time later going over that image multiple times.
Once you’ve isolated the images that you’re working on, you can begin the first pass of the culling process.
The only goal here is culling images as fast as possible. Select the first photo in your folder and enter Fullscreen Mode in Lightroom (press “F”). Use the right arrow key to scroll through your images one at a time.
You should have an idea of what isn’t a good photo in your mind. You’re looking for things that fall into that category. Did the flash misfire? Are the eyes partly closed? Is the facial expression not flattering? Is the lighting not quite right? Is the focus off?
If there’s a fault in the image, find it and press “X.”
The second pass
Now that you have completed the first run through your images, you should find that you’ve rejected most of them. The next step is to isolate the images that you haven’t culled from the ones you need to review again.
There are a few ways you can do this. You can create a new Collection and add the images that are to be reviewed. Or you could remove the rejected images from the Collection you are working in.
Using the sorting options on the bottom toolbar, you can sort by Pick. This will put all of your rejects at the bottom of the catalog, making it easy to go through for the second pass.
You could also use the sorting options on the bottom toolbar in the Library Module. This will put any rejected images at the end of the gallery. From there, you can select all of the unflagged images and enter Fullscreen Mode again. As you cycle through the images a second time, you’ll first see the shots you have selected.
For this pass, you are trying to achieve the same thing as the first: to reject as many images as possible. This time it will take longer, as these are images that you have already decided don’t have any immediate faults. Feel free to take extra time and have a careful look over the images. Just remember that you are still not picking any photos yet, merely getting rid of the ones that aren’t suitable.
You can repeat this stage as many times as you need in order to narrow down your Collection to the few best images. For the sake of brevity, we’ll move directly on to the next stage and assume you’ve narrowed your images down as much as possible.
The third pass
Using this method, I was able to narrow down this set to three images in a little over ten minutes.
At this point, you should have a much smaller group of images to work with.
(If you still have a lot of photos, go back and be more ruthless.)
You can now go through and start making your final selections. It should be a lot easier now that you have a much smaller pool to go through. Use the Pick flags or star ratings to indicate the photos you want to work on and reject any photos that still need rejecting.
At the end of your culling sessions, you should have a concise selection of images that reflect the best shots from a particular set.
How many should you aim for?
If you’re wondering how many images you should aim to have left once this is all over, the answer is: it depends.
The number of final images is going to vary wildly depending on how you shoot and what you are shooting for. For example, if I am shooting for myself, I will be looking for one or two images per set. That set may start with 10 photos in it. It may start with 100. I am still only looking for one or two.
If I’m doing a short portrait session for a client, I might end up with 15-20 proofs to present. If I was photographing an event, I would go through and get rid of the obvious rejects and keep everything that was left.
Canon 5D Mark III | Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 | 85mm | 1/2000 sec | f/2.8 | ISO 200
There is no right answer. Only you can answer how many images you need in the end. This whole process of culling images is there to get you to those final photos faster, rather than get you to a certain number.
Keeping it basic
The tools and the process outlined in this article are very basic. It’s how I do it and it’s like that for a reason. The process is uncomfortable and forces you, for a little while, to focus on your mistakes.
When I am culling images, I want it completed as soon as possible, and I don’t want my tools to get in the way of the process. That said, Lightroom has a whole host of other features that could be used in the culling process. By all means, use them if they suit you. It doesn’t matter how you get the job done as long as you get it done.
Conclusion
I know that this can be a difficult process. You have a catalog of images on the screen that you created and poured all kinds of effort into. You just want to look through them and feel good about the photos you’ve made. You don’t want to jump in and start finding faults with 90% of them. I understand. I’m the same.
However, as disheartening as it feels at first, once you start culling images and the best images from a shoot start showing themselves (usually after a short while), that allows you to focus only on the best.
Trust me: The images that you cut get quickly forgotten, anyway. It’s best to be done with them fast; that way you can focus the rest of your time and effort on the images that will benefit you and your portfolio.
The post Tips for Culling Images for Better Results and More Efficiency appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by John McIntire.
Can you happily throw away your worst images and concentrate on your winners? Are you confident culling your photos to find the best?
I know many photographers struggle to cull their photos after coming back home from an enjoyable photo session. It can be effortless to create hundreds of images from a photo session you are immersed in. But feeling buried by a mountain of new photos to post-process can be discouraging.
The key to breaking free of this dilemma is to discern which of the photos are worth keeping, which are the best, and which to throw out. To do this you need a method, a good healthy workflow. Possessing a positive attitude will be a considerable help too.
I use Adobe Lightroom to import and cull my images and I will refer to it during this article. The workflow I am sharing can be utilized with any similar software.
Start by Seeing Your Best
Creative people often excel at being negative when it comes to their own creations. How many times have you heard musicians tell you they are not practiced enough to perform? Or friends who paint tell you they don’t have the confidence to complete a canvas they are working on?
It is quite typical of creatives to be too hard on themselves.
When you first load your images from a new photo session be purposefully positive. Don’t let yourself get sucked into negative thoughts. Start looking for the best photos in a series you have made, not the worst.
Take some time to scan through and get an overview of your new pictures. Look for the ones which excite you and mark them. You can use a flag, color or star rating.
Take Out the Worst
You will usually have some photos which are clearly not usable. It is best to remove these from your workspace right at the start.
The most common problems not able to be fixed are:
Poor focus
Bad timing
Very poor exposure
Unwanted image blur
Bad focus
You cannot fix poor focus in post-production. If you have a photo that is not sharp where it really needs to be, delete it. It is not worth keeping. Some amount of sharpening can be applied but is only somewhat effective on photos which are slightly out of focus.
This one gets deleted. It is not focused.
Very poor exposure
Working with RAW files produced by a modern camera, the images need to be really over or underexposed before I throw them out. You must know your camera and your own post-processing skills. Still, if the exposure is way off, delete it.
Unwanted blur
Sometimes we want blur in a photo. That nice silky look waterfall. The bicycle rider passing. The people walking by in the market. When you have motion blur because your subject moved or your camera has moved, delete those images.
Occasionally you can still make something of an image like that. Not by fixing it, but rethinking it and applying some careful post-processing, but not often.
Bad timing
Maybe someone has walked in front of your camera just as you took a photo. Perhaps the bird you were photographing had already flown out of frame. Many things can happen like this that means you have missed the shot or the decisive moment. Delete them.
Poor timing makes this photo unusable.
Don’t Want to Delete?
If you are nervous about deleting photos at first, you can just hide them. I use the flags to determine which images I see and which I do not.
In Lightroom when you are in Grid view in the Library Module with the filter bar showing at the top, click on Attributes at the top of the window. If you then click on the black flag to turn it off all the images you apply a black flag to (rejected) will be hidden from view. To quickly apply a black flag to an image, select it and hit the X key to mark it as rejected.
You can bring the hidden black flagged images back into view by turning on the black flag in the Attributes bar.
Once I have am confident I want to delete my flagged images I turn off the other two flags in the Attribute bar. With only the images I have flagged as rejected showing, I select them all and hit the Delete key and delete them from my disk.
NOTE:Lightroom will give you the option of just removing them from the program or deleting from your hard drive as well – I do the latter, but make note they will be gone forever so make sure you have the right images before hitting delete.
Use the grid view, Attributes and flags to help your workflow.
Select Similar Images
Now begin to work through to separate out the best of your photos. Many photographers will take multiple frames of whatever they are photographing. This results in too many images that are really similar. To deal with these, it is good to compare them to each other.
Do this by selecting four to six images and hitting the N key. The selected images will be displayed and the others will be hidden from view. You can now begin to compare your similar images. Using this method it is much easier to concentrate on the qualities of the photos and decide which ones are better than others. Look for similarities and differences in each frame.
Maybe your timing is noticeably better in one than the others. Maybe your composition was a little different or more interesting in one over another. Narrowing down your options as you go will help you see the stronger images more easily.
To do this, keep using the X key to flag the photos as rejects (note: do not do this using the comparison N view as it will tag them all at the same time) so they become hidden. Once you have only one photo in view, press the G key to take you back to Grid view. Now you can select more photos and repeat the process. I sometimes keep the best image from my last selection to compare with three or five other images in the series.
Select similar images (use ctrl+click) and the N key to view only the images you have selected.
Look for Strengths in Your Photos
Choose photos which are well-exposed and well composed. Look at your backgrounds. Are there unwanted distractions which will be too difficult to remove? If so, use the X key.
Do you have one or two where your exposure is bang on? These will be potential keepers. Using the P key will mark them with a white flag (as a Pick). You could also use colors or star ratings (from 1-5) to mark your favorites.
In this frame, the monk was well focused (pun intended)
Find the photos that make you feel good. Narrow down your selection step by step.
By making comparisons with a small selection it should be less vexing than with all your photos showing at once. You will be more confident to come to recognize your best work using this method. If you are more randomly browsing through hundreds of photos at one time you are less likely to find your best photos as easily.
The post Tips for Culling Your Photos – How to Throw Away the Worst and Concentrate on the Winners appeared first on Digital Photography School.
Believe me, I have tried. Over the years, I have tried to wean myself off ACDSee. But, like Al Pacino in The Godfather, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”. ACDSee does what I want it to do and, as a single package, and it does it better than anything else I have found.
I use Lightroom as a factory, a mass production tool. I import the images, I process them, that’s it. For a long time, I have felt no urge to look at anything other than the Library and Develop modules.
The wood shed.
Continuing the analogy, what I might call handcrafted images, are processed in the garden shed, with Photoshop. Pretty much everything else I do in ACDSee.
ACDSee in place of Adobe Bridge
First and foremost, ACDSee is an Adobe Bridge replacement for me. For something like 80% of the time, I use about 20% of its capacity, that is its ability to act in the place of Bridge. I am certain that I have only launched Adobe Bridge once in the last year. I had to do it just once to write this article! ACDSee simply does it better in my opinion.
Standard file manager style screen
Any of the different versions, even the most basic of them, meet my needs. The screen shots for this article are from ACDSee Ultimate, but my previous experience is that all versions work in a similar way. You would need to work out just how many bells and whistles you wanted to invest in. ACDSee offers a good comparison of the different versions on their website. I am sure you would find that ACDSee is not a challenging piece of software, it works quite conventionally.
This article may well invite some comments suggesting that “such and such” software does that too, and I am sure that is true. Is the elephant in the room Photo Mechanic, is it Irfan View, or even Adobe Bridge? I am also sure that there are even others. So I try others, I give them a go, but I end up back in the arms of the little-known all-around beauty which is ACDSee.
Lifestyle
I tend to be a little bemused when I have heard people talk about having a lifestyle. I have wondered if I ought to get myself such a thing. My reaction is not much different when people talk about having a workflow. Different situations seem to me to require different approaches, and I have wondered if I should get myself a workflow.
The truth is that I am not totally slapdash. For example, if I have been out on a photo walk, there is a routine which I tend to follow. Stepping through that routine seems a good way to look at some aspects of ACDSee. Here is my process.
IMPORTING IMAGES
ACDSee provides a ton of choices for importing photographs, let me highlight just one.
Import window of ACDSee.
I am a huge believer in the adage that “Data only exists if it exists in two places”. The extension of that thought is that you do not actually have a backup until you have a third copy. Presuming that you leave your images on the card in the camera, ACDSee gives you the choice to make two copies on import and to give you those second and third copies of your images. The first copy can be imported to one folder and the second copy can be imported to another location. That might just prove to be a very useful safety net one day. You might be glad you tried ACDSee for this reason alone.
It might be a consequence of having used computers since before The Ark, but I still tend to think in terms of named and dated folders. Libraries, collections and the like, clearly work for some, but I import to my date/location file structure, then into Lightroom from there.
THE CULLING PROCESS
One of the most important parts of my workflow (Oops! did I just admit to something?) is the culling process. I will take a long time sorting through the photographs, in sweeps, which are progressively more demanding, deleting those which I do not want to spend time processing. ACDSee helps me with the cull in at least 3 ways.
1 – ACDSee is fast with RAW files
Subjectively, I tend to find Adobe Bridge rather clunky to operate and slow in responding. It was painfully slow to open a folder and draw the thumbnails on a computer with quite high specifications. The same folder was opened, with thumbnails and images viewable very promptly, in less than ten seconds with ACDSee. It was taking so long with Bridge, the images were still not viewable after 2 minutes, that I moved to another copy I have of the same images on a faster, SSD drive. In all fairness, Bridge was then just as quick as ACDSee.
Adobe Bridge
Objectively, ACDSee is faster at drawing a RAW file than Bridge to an insane degree. I took shot Image A and opened it to a full-screen view in ACDSee, then in Bridge. Then I reversed the process and opened Image B in Bridge first, then in ACDSee. Both ways, using ACDSee, the image was clear, viewable in sharp detail, within 2 seconds. Using Bridge, after more than 30 seconds I gave up, clicked to zoom in, and only then did it become a clear, sharp, fully-drawn image.
That adds up to an awful lot of time over the years. I cannot fathom that there is anyone who likes sitting and waiting for their computer to catch up. Not only would you save a huge amount of time cumulatively, it also makes for a much more satisfying experience.
2 – Comparing images is easy with ACDSee
Second, the process of culling is easier because ACDSee offers an excellent tool for comparing photographs in close detail. I know Lightroom offers something similar, probably others do too, but none seem to work as well as that in ACDSee. Often I will have a series of four or five shots (or more) which are largely similar. ACDSee lets you put those shots on screen, next to each other, all at the same time. Actually, I think it works best with just three on screen at a time.
Three or more photographs compared side by side.
The choice as to which photograph to keep often comes down to a technical decision such as which shot is the sharpest. For a portrait, that usually means looking at the eye. With ACDSee, when you zoom in on one of the photographs which you are comparing, all of the shots zoom in to the same point, at the same level. Again, I acknowledge that other software probably does this, but I have not come across all the things I want, working as well as they do, in one package.
All three shots zoomed in to the same level.
3 – Full-screen mode
The third way in which ACDSee helps me cull images is that it goes to full screen so very easily and quickly. It displays photographs in the way I want to see them. Full screen, with no window border, no mouse pointer. Double click or hit Enter and you are in full screen. Also “Crtl/Cmd+scroll wheel” zooms you in. That is how I want to view photographs.
Then, there are two bonuses. First, a right click option is Zoom Lock, which means I can Page Up and Page Down between shots which are full screen and zoomed in to the same point and level. You might even prefer this to the side by side comparison. The next bonus, which can be useful now and then, is that the EXIF data can be brought up very quickly with ALT/OPTION+Enter in the full-screen view mode.
Full-screen mode, with the EXIF data, added on the right.
All the above is mostly about ACDSee being used as a replacement for Adobe Bridge. One important thing I have not squeezed in so far is that you can open an image straight into Photoshop from ACDSee. It does the file browser function of Bridge just as well, and a very easy keystroke combination of Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+X takes the image into Photoshop. It is probably the only shortcut I can use without looking at the keyboard.
These factors alone make a case for why ACDSee keeps pulling me back in. However, there is more!
BATCH PROCESSING
ACDsee has a good selection of batch operations.
The tools which I probably use most often, and they work very well, with all the options you could ask for, are the batch tools. I find it so helpful that ACDSee will batch resize a number of images, then convert the file format, then rename them. There are a few other tricks too.
It is not part of the batch menu but, at least in my mind, it is linked. I often publish directly to social websites where, again, you are given useful choices.
Send to …
This is probably a good place to mention again that I know Adobe has the tools to do all of this. But I do not think anyone can believe that they are as simple to use, and they are certainly not all in one place.
MANAGE
As I have already confessed, I am still in the mentality of file browsers, and that is the format which you are looking at with ACDSee. It has all the benefits which you would expect from such a tool. You can search, play with metadata, sort by different criteria, look at different views … it just works well.
Full-screen slideshow.
Seems this might be the time to mention that ACDSee does good slide shows too, with some level of sophistication. Full screen, with the toolbar you can see above only appearing when you click on the screen. Most notably, that gives you the ability to change the delay. For more sophisticated settings, you can dig a little deeper.
Slideshow settings window.
EDITING
Finally, the part of ACDSee which I use least often, though still appreciate, is the program’s capacity as an image editor.
I do sometimes use it for one-off processing of an image. Some people suggest that ACDSee is a full blown alternative to products which are much better known. ACDSee will handle RAW, it has layers, it is non-destructive … it has some clever tricks … if you do a search on You Tube, you will find plenty of people offering not just enthusiasm, but solid tuition that might persuade you that ACDSee can meet ALL your photographic needs in what would then be a very reasonably priced package.
Read dPS author Leanne Cole’s review here: Photo Editing Alternative – An Overview of ACDSee Ultimate 10
It might seem trivial, but what I often use ACDSee for is cropping and leveling. Without a description of the minute details, it has all the usual cropping facilities, but with the easy ability to set dimensions precisely to the pixel.
Pixel precise cropping.
You can then place the mask precisely on the image, in a way that I have not found any other program capable of doing. I also like the way it allows you to vary the opacity of the image area outside the mask. If you set a crop dimension and move through a series of photographs, the dimension will also be retained from one photograph to the next.
A helpful tool.
It also works similarly with regards rotating the image.
You can rotate by the degree.
I’ve not used anything else which lets you rotate the image with such precision, auto-cropping as you go.
Again, a clear display of what is happening, with helpful options
CONCLUSION
I love the forensic, hugely detailed reviews which, for example, DP Review conducts. This article cannot be of that nature. It is more a taster, highlighting a few of the things which I find helpful to me personally, and which might work for you too. I also join others in celebrating the underdog, particularly if it is, in fact, a really good team, which plays a good game.
Why not go over to ACDSee, download it for a 30-day free trial and give it a go yourself. If you already use it, tell us in the comments below what features you love the most and why.
The post Why I Use ACDSee Versus Adobe Bridge for Culling Images and More by Richard Messsenger appeared first on Digital Photography School.
This tutorial has been transcribed from the SLR Lounge Lightroom 4 Workshop on DVD, a 14 hour Lightroom 4 A – Z guide with over 130 tutorials for mastering Lightroom from start to finish. The Digital download can be purchased from SLR Lounge while the physical copy is available through Amazon Prime.
Overview
In this article, we will go over one of our culling systems that we use at Lin and Jirsa Photography. We currently use the “Editing In” System at our studio, but in this article, we will go over the “Editing Out” System. Both systems are fast and effective; however, the “Editing In” System works a bit better for us (We will cover that “Editing In” workflow in an upcoming tutorial). Keep in mind that there is no one right culling system, so feel free to set up one that works best for you.
Either way, it is a good idea to keep your culling system as streamlined as possible. Our “Editing Out” System is a quick way to cull through images, so keep reading to see how you can save time in your production workflow!
KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid
As mentioned before, it is best to have a simple culling system because it can save you a lot of time. In most cases, the KISS acronym is quite fitting. Keep it simple, stupid. Seconds saved per image can end up being hours by the time you work through a large image catalog. Sometimes, photographers create rather complex culling systems to try and keep their images meticulously organized right from the start. For example, they may use the 5-star rating system like the one below.
5 stars = Portfolio photo
4 stars = Blog photo
3 stars = Average photo (delivered)
2 stars = A little potential but unsure (undelivered)
1 star = Reject image
While this kind of a rating system sounds great in theory, it can become too cumbersome when working from image to image since it requires you to carefully analyze each image and make too many decisions at once. “Is it good enough to keep, if so, is it blog worthy, or portfolio worthy, etc.” This is why we stress creating a simple culling system. We won’t truly know what images are blog or portfolio worthy until we are done culling, editing and finishing our images. At that point, we can scan through and quickly select and mark our blog/portfolio images in just a minute or two. Trying to make that decision during the initial culling is not only time consuming, it is impossible to make correctly.
So, let’s go over the 3 steps of the “Editing Out” System that you can adopt into your workflow to help speed things up.
The 3 Step “Editing Out” Culling Process
If you have seen our Lightroom 4 Workflow System DVD, you know that Lin & Jirsa Photography currently uses the “Editing In” System, which we mentioned earlier. In the “Editing Out” System, we will select all of our images in the catalog as a “pick” by pressing “P”. Then, we will go through each individual image and reject the images we do not want to deliver. The “Editing Out” System is simple because we now only have 1 choice : keep the image and move to the next or reject the image by pressing “X.”
Immediately, our workflow process has moved from 5 possible decisions with 5 different keystrokes, to only 1 decision and 1 keystroke.
Step 1: Flag All Images as Picks
We need to flag all images in our catalog as a Pick. Return to the Grid View by pressing “G.” Then, select all of your images by pressing “Ctrl + A.” Next, press “P” to flag all images as Picks. Then deselect your images by pressing “Ctrl + D.” This will allow us to go through our images and un-flag them during the culling process.
Step 2: Filter by Flag Status
Next, we need to filter our images, so that when we “reject” an image it disappears from view. We are going to filter by flag status, so click on the first flag, as shown below. Now, we can only see flagged images. Anytime we press “X” to mark an image as a “reject” it will disappear from view.
Step 3: Culling Images
While we view and cull our images, we want to have as much screen space as possible. Press “F” twice to go into Full Screen Mode. Then press “Tab” to get rid of the left and right panels. Double-click on your image to view the image in full screen. Now, we are going to start culling our images. If you want to reject an image, press “X.” Since the Filter is set to only display “Flagged” images, any rejected image will automatically disappear from the lineup. Continue moving through your images by pressing the Right Arrow on your keyboard.
With the “Editing Out” System, we only have 1 option to consider, is the photo deliverable, or is it not. Is it worth keeping, or is it not. Deciding on whether it belongs on your blog, or portfolio should really come after all the images have been finalized and edited, not during the initial culling.
If you turn off all filters, you can see that the rejected images are grayed out. If you want to look at the rejected photos, just turn on the Rejected Filter, down in Filters.
So, hopefully this article was helpful to you. In the next culling article, we will show you are simple “Editing In” workflow. Just remember to keep your culling system simple, and it will save you many hours of time!
Learn More with the Lightroom 4 Workshop Collection!
This was a sample tutorial from the Lightroom 4 A to Z DVD which is one of the DVDs in the Lightroom 4 Workshop Collection. A collection of nearly 30 hours of video education teaching everything from Lightroom basics to advanced raw processing techniques.
The LR4 Workshop Collection also includes the critically acclaimed Lightroom 4 Preset System which is designed to enable users to achieve virtually any look and effect within 3-5 simple clicks. From basic color correction, vintage fades, black & white effects, tilt-shift effects, faux HDR, retouching, detail enhancing, and so much more. Click the links above to learn more.
Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.
Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.
A Simple 3 Step Culling Workflow: The “Editing Out” Culling System
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