Hi everybody, welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV, I'm Mark Wallace and I'm
joined by Marelli she's been in several
videos in the past.
Well today's video is about culling
images in lightroom and so Marelli and I
spent about an hour or so shooting a bunch
of different sets. We also had another
model named Monique that came in a little
bit earlier. I shot her,
and so now on my laptop, I've got all these
images that we shot and I need to sort
through those, pick the winners and then
make sure I process everything and get
them back to the model so they can put
them in their portfolios.
So how do you do that quickly? How do you
get from camera to the computer, to your
client in a very efficient and fast way?
Well there's some really cool shortcuts
in Lightroom so let's hop over there and
I'll show you that right now.
One of the best ways, to quickly move through
Lightroom and select your images that
are the winners are by using keyboard
shortcuts, now we can't go through every
single keyboard shortcut that we're going
to be using in this tutorial but I will
show you one that rules them all. That is
Command or Control, Forward slash
Keyboard; cmd⌘ + / or ctrl + /
When you do that you'll be bringing
up this window that shows
you all of the library shortcuts
and we're going to be using a lot of the
view shortcuts that are listed on the
left here at the rating shortcuts for
setting ratings and picking images
and the flagging shortcuts, so if you don't
know what these are again all you have
to do is hit; cmd⌘ + / or ctrl + /
in lightroom and that's going to bring up
this keyboard shortcut cheat-sheet that
works by the way in every module. The
develop mac book slide show print
and web module. All allow you to do that.
Just hit Command or Control, Forward slash
and those shortcuts will be showing
up on your screen.
Okay, now what we're going to be doing here
is; there are two modes that we will be
using in this tutorial that is the
Compare mode and the Survey mode. You can
find those in the Library module at the
very bottom of your screen in the
toolbar. If your toolbar isn't there make
sure you hit 'T' to bring that up. You'll
see that there is this little 'X Y' that's
the compare view and then next to that
is the Survey view or Survey mode and
you'll use that to supplement your
flagging and rating system to pick
winners for images that are very similar
so when I shot Monique and I shot
Marelli, we intentionally shot a lot of
images that were very, very similar to
illustrate how to use these views to
choose the winner, the best of very
similar images. Now to make this really
make sense we're going to zip over here
I have created some numbers and animal
names here for us to compare and rate
and figure out which ones are the best.
This is going to help us understand
these modes a little bit better.
We're going to start by using the
compare mode so I'm going to click on
number one and then I'm going to hit the
that's going to bring me
into the compare mode and you'll get a
view like this. Going to make this a little
bit easier to understand, I'm going to
open up my film strips so you can see all
these different images here. What we're
doing here is we're comparing two items
on the left is our select. That's the
winner. That's the king. That's the best.
That's the one that we think is the
select image to show to our client.
On the right is the candidate that's the
image were saying; is this one better,
than the one that we've selected?
So is the candidate better than the Select?
So right now we're saying; is number two
better than number one? Now we can move
through these candidates by either using
our right and left arrows right here or
we can just use the right and left arrow
keys on the keyboard and you'll see here
in the film strip and I'm moving back
and forth between all these different
things so I'm saying is number two
better than one? No. Is number three
better than one? No. Is number four
better than one? No. How about five? How
about six? How about seven? So eventually I'm
going to find an image that's better
than the Select. Once that happens what
we need to do is we need to make our
candidate the Select and we do that by
clicking on this little button right
over here, so it says make select.
When we click that, now we're saying number seven
is the king. It's the winner, it's the best
that's what we want our client to see.
Seven is the Select. Now we're looking to say;
is eight better than seven? No.
How about nine? No.
How about ten? No. Alright
seven is the winner. We've compared it to
everything by process of elimination.
It's the winner, so what we can do then
on number seven is we can then hit 'P'
and we can hit five or whatever.
We can set our rating
we can set colors
and we can make that our winner.
Now let's go in and look at something a
little bit different here. Let's go and
say that we are looking at animals.
We're trying to figure out which animal is our
favorite? So very, very simple are horses
better than Birds?
Well no I think birds are better.
How about kittens?
Well yeah kittens are better than that.
So what about puppies or kittens?
hmm, now this is where it gets difficult,
because we know that snakes and zebras
those aren't as good,
but kittens and puppies?
well these two things, well they're very
very similar, so what can we do?
Well lucky for us we can choose both of
them so I'm going to click on the select,
hit 'P'. Click on the candidate, hit 'P', but
then I'm going to have to make a choice.
Which one is better, the best, the very
very best? I'm going to say puppies is the
very best so I'm going to make that the
select and then I might rate that as a
five star animal. When I go back to my
gridvie, now look, we have all of our
ratings I can say; show me everything
that I flagged and then we know that is
number seven and puppies.
Those are our five star ratings and we've
chosen the two things that are the best of
the best of these animals and numbers.
Okay now how does that relate to real life
and how can we use all of this?
Well there's one other thing I need to
show you before we move on and that is
stacking. Stacking allows us to group
similar items into stacks. Think of them
like cards, a deck of cards stacked up
and you can expand or collapse those, so
it's easy to do this, so I'm going to take
the animals here.
I'm going to click on birds
and then I'm going to; shift click on
zebras. Now notice I've selected all of these
animals and then what I'm going to do is
right click. Go to stacking,
Group into stack
I'll click on that and now we have this
group of images. Now on the right there's
these two little lines on the left,
there's two little lines,
if you click that
it expands that stack.
If you click it again, it collapses that
or you can just
hit the 'S' key to expand
'S' again to collapse.
I'm going to do that
same thing with our numbers here,
but instead of right-clicking going to
stacking and saying Group in this stack
what I'm going to do instead, is just hit
command or Ctrl+G and that will stack
that and so now we have two groups.
Numbers and animals and we can go
through there and we can use those, now
here's one caveat, one thing you have to
understand notice we have these two
flags inside this stack. If I collapse
the stack go up here to attribute, say
show me everything that is flagged. Notice
no photos matched the filter.
Why not?
We know we have two images
that are flagged,
the reason for that is these will only show
things that are in expanded stacks.
So I'm going to expand the stack.Ggo up here
to attribute, show me everything that's
flagged and there we go;
kittens and puppies show up.
It works just fine
How does this really
relate to real life?
Well lucky for you we have a shoot that
we did, so I'm going to go down here
I created a collection here
and it's called sorting the winners.
Now notice in this
collection we have a bunch of similar
items so the first thing I want to do is
stack these in items that are similar
so that I can sort through these
and sort of do these by groups.
It's really easy to do this
and we don't have to do this manually.
In other words we don't have to go
through here and shift-click and do all
that stuff that we did with the animals
and numbers. There's a better way to do
it, if you've done a photoshoot. So in
this photo shoot I shot for a little
while took a break, reset, maybe we changeD
an outfit, started shooting again, took a
break, changed outfit, started shooting
again so there are gaps between these
photo shoots, these different sets in
time and so we can just use that to our
advantage. So we're going to right click
go to Stacking, Auto-stack by Capture Time
Now when I click on that I can say;
how much time is between each stack?
In other words how long is the break
between this first shot of Monique here
on this background and this second set, so
I know by playing around with this
little slider here that we took about
two minutes between two or more minutes
between each different lighting setup
and so I'm going to set this at two
minutes. You can play with that and you
can see how many stacks you're going to
get in a live preview here, by just moving
this around so I know that we only had
six different groups
and so I'm just going to go over here to
two minutes and once I have that it says okay
six stacks, so I'm going to say Stack
I'm going to right click on this say
Stacking and then I'm going to say
Collapse All Stacks. Now look at this.
We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
and I can hit the S key to expand these.
There's the blue dress.
There's the red dress.
There's the little set that we did,
I didn't like. Here is Marelli on the bench etc.
So we automatically group these into
stacks that makes sense that's really
going to help us, especially when we go
to a client maybe you shot a catalog or
something and you want to say okay;
here's the red dress, the blue dress
or a wedding?
Here's the reception, here is the signing
of the wedding contract.
Here are all those
different things.
We can show those in groups.
It really makes sense.
Now I'm going to dive in here,
expand these and start taking a look
using those tools that we have.
The first thing I noticed is we have
two really dark images
and we have a bunch of light images.
Why is that?
So I'm going to click on
this first dark image here and the
second one. Hit 'C' to compare and the
nice thing is, I can click and zoom to
100% and look at that.
What is the difference and I remember, oh
yeah in this image here, I was using a
studio light. It's crystal clear.
Over here I was using ambient light and we
gave up on it because we just didn't
have enough light, so this first light
right here, yeah, that's a winner.
I'm going to hit 'P'.
I'm going to pick that, I'm going go out
here and so I've already used Compare
in a different way than I showed you
before, to figure out which
item is the winner.
Right let's go down here to a
different stack. Let's go down here to
this blue dress.
These are all very, very similar images.
Now one of the things I haven't shown
you yet is the Survey mode, so Survey
mode is the one that's next to compare
You get into that by hitting 'N' now this
is by process of elimination. Instead of
comparing one image to the next, to the
next, to the next. This shows you everything in
sort of a light table view and what you
can do; there's a little black X next to
each of these images. If you click on
that, it just removes them from the view.
It doesn't change any of the metadata.
It doesn't change the flag. It doesn't change
the rating. It doesn't do anything
but just take it away, so this right here
well Marelli has closed eyes I'm going to
get rid of that. I don't like this pose
and so we're going to start being really
really picky and by process of
elimination we're saying; No, don't like
that one. Of these three here I think
this one's a little bit wonky. Okay these
look very similar, get rid of that.
These two look almost the same now
we've got two images, I don't like this
one as much as this one.
That's the winner
'P' for pick I hit four stars go back to my
gridview and I've already picked the
winner and so that's what Survey mode
does for you. It allows you to really
quickly look at your images so again you
can go through here, you can say; oh you
know what, these are very very similar
'N', Survey mode. She's looking weird
there, this is not so good. I don't like
the way this dress looks etc.
and you can just really quickly remove
images from your selection, until finally
you go; you know what, that's the best one
right there. Boom and then you have it
Survey mode, Compare mode, Flagging
Picking, Rating, it will really help you
especially using your shortcut keys to
select the winners, specifically winners
that are very similar images in a set.
Pick the best one of the best and then
you can go in and say you know what
show me all the ones that I flagged as
winners. You can take those and then you
can take them to your client.
Show them off.
They'll choose the ones that they like
the best and then everybody wins because
you've saved yourself a lot of time.
Well that's all there is to it. Once you
know the shortcut keys and those tricks
to culling images, you can really blast
through those really quickly, do all of
your edits and get them to your clients,
like Marelli here and their happy,
you're happy.
You've saved yourself time
and its really, really, easy.
Thank you again for being a wonderful
model in this episode. Thank you for
joining us for this episode, don't forget
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I'll see you again next time.