Post Process Flow

Having arrived at home with a memory card full of shots, it's now time for the follow up work to turn these into pictures that you are happy to share. Into the digital darkroom we go !

Flow Outline

• Load pictures onto computer
• Import them to photo editor / manager
• Select the good shots (reject the rest)
• Edit the good pictures
• Publish
• Clean up

Today I am going to give an overview of the process, but in another post I'll talk in much more detail about the actual editing stage.

Download the pictures

The first step is to get the pictures off the memory card into the computer. Since I am running in a Mac environment and want to manage all the picture locations myself, I use Apple's Image Capture to download the shots. This allows me to choose a folder, download and then wipe the card ready for next time. I usually create a folder that contains all of the original pictures (usually sorted by sub folders for each game), and in that team folder I also keep the Lightroom library file. This keeps the whole structure more portable if I want to move it from drive to drive as the referencing in the library file stays consistent with the picture locations.

Import

The next step is to import these into the photo editor / manager to create the association between the original picture and the library file. I import all the pictures into Lightroom and then select all the photos and tag them with the name of the opponent team. This helps later with sorting and particularly when you play multiple teams in the same day. I then create a working structure for each game. In Lightroom we use "Collections" to manage the pictures and there is usually a similar concept in other editors. I create a Collection Set for each game and them within the Set I have an "All pics" Collection. I drag all the imported pictures into this "All pics" and this becomes the location that I work from.

Sort

I then create an additional two Smart Collections that I used to automatically sort the pictures. I create one Smart Collection called "Gallery" and another called "Rejected" and I set up a rule set for each as follows...

By using the date and the opponent name I ensure that I am only looking at the shots from a particular game. The ones I want to keep (Gallery) are all tagged with a rating of 1 or above, all the rejected shots (Rejected) have a rating of zero. When we import the pictures, all of them are rated as zero and so initially all of your shots will show up in the Rejected collection. I then step through the pictures and give each of them a rating. In Lightroom this is simply achieved by pressing the rating number on the keyboard as you view each picture (e.g. "1" for a rating of one star). This moves all the rated pictures out of the Rejected collection and into the Gallery collection. When you have been though all the pictures you will have sort all the good from the rest. In a typical game I take 300-500 shots and I would expect to have 60-120 in the Gallery. This can be adjusted as you go through and edit, but it allows you to concentrate only on the good shots.

Edit

I then select the Gallery so I am only dealing with the better shots (in focus, etc.) , switch to the "Develop" module in Lightroom and then adjust the pictures. I'll describe this in more detail in a following post. As I go through and look in detail, I also sometimes remove pictures from the output by resetting their rating to zero. Having worked through all the pictures I now have a finished set edits ready to publish.

Publish

I then select all the pictures in my Gallery and Export to a new directory where I stored the edited version of the pictures. Lightroom is a non-destructive editor and so all my originals are preserved in my library, so this is the adjusted set of pictures that the rest of the world sees. I usually publish my shots in Flickr and use the very convenient Flickr Uploadier to take care of getting these up into the cloud. I then send the link to on-line gallery to my teams so that they can share and download the pictures that they want.

Clean Up

The final stage is to go back to the Collection Set of the game and delete all the pictures in the Rejected Gallery. In order to manage disk space, I want to use this process to delete the originals from my drive as well. I go to the Rejected Gallery, select all the pictures in in (cmd + A), then I delete all these pictures from the Collection and off of the disk (move to Trash) by pressing Option + cmd + Shift + Delete (on a Mac). This note from Adobe describes this trick in more detail. Having done this we have now reclaimed the disk space for yet more pictures !!

I hope you like this overview of my workflow...using this method I can usually process a games worth of pictures in approximately an hour. There are many ways to approach this and if you have other suggestions or questions, please leave me a comment.