David Ziser (of Digital Pro Talk fame) has a great article on how he processes a weddings worth of pictures in record time.

He states that weddings vary, but he can shoot 3-4 thousand images at an event and as all wedding photographers, needs to get thru them quickly and effectively in short order.

Read more on his workflow here.

One thing that puzzles me is that many photographers are hanging on to old-school ingestion practices (i.e. getting images off the camera and onto your computer). They use all manner of stand alone ingestion applications (or even just use the Finder/Explorer) to do the job, when Lightroom has a very capable and time-saving import feature that does most of the heavy lifting automatically for you.

Lightroom was designed to help you speed up your photographic workflow. Five years ago, the digital workflow was immature and required many separate applications that the happless photographer cobbled together just to get thier job done and inefficiencies were inherent in the process. Times change, and Lightroom is a more holistic, efficient approach.

Importing with Lightroom

Here is a quick tutorial on Lightroom’s Import feature to get some of you off those shareware solutions and onto something that saves you time/effort.

1. Make sure Lightroom is running and insert your CF or SD cards. Lightroom wil prompt you with the Import dialog automatically. If anything else comes up (i.e. a “helpful” Windows or Mac diaolg - turn that off now - you won’t be needing those anymore). This is what you’ll see. I have the Previews turned off as I generally just do a “dump and go” operation, but sometimes it is nice to see the thumbnails.

2. Decide where to save your files. Don’t panic about this - you are in control here with the Copy to pop up. You can save them on the internal drive (ie. in the Pictures folder) or on an external drive in a Photo Archive folder of your creation. Just pick one and stick with it. I save all my files into a Photo Archive/YYYY/Month hierarchy on an external Raid drive. Lightroom will remember from import to import where you put them, so you don’t thave to change this every time. In fact, most things here are sticky from session to session so you’re doing the hard work only once.

3. The Import dialog is designed to save you time at the front end of the workflow. Here are some quick recommendations:

• You should convert to DNG automatically by in the File Handling pop up. DNG is more efficient, smaller and archival. Nuff Said. And be warned, it wil take a bit of extra time to do this.
• You can organize the import by various date formats or into a named folder (ie. Job Name/Number)
• You can check to make sure you are not importing files already in the catalog
• Skip the Backup option - right now its a pretty basic back up of the files from the card - you need a more comprehensive backup strategy.

4. If you choose, you can reame your files using the comprehensive File Naming option. This dialog looks like this and contains a plethora of options.

• You can add custom text, or add any tolkens from any of the areas (numbering, date, file name etc).
• You can save templates for future use - this speeds things up even more.

5. In this step, you’ll want to apply a few things to the images as they are imported:

• A basic Develop preset - I have one from Matt Kloskowski s LIghtroom Killer Tips page that does a basic adjustment that works well for me.
• A metadata template. I have a basic one that contains my basic contact and copyright info.

• Keywords - a quick way to get a basic set of generic keywords for the shoot into the files.
• Preview genration - most files have a basic jpeg preview built in, but it is small and you’ll need something bigger to rate and develop the file - you can do this by choosing 1:1 here. Note again, this will take extra time.

6. Hit Import and let Lightroom do its thing. No more shuffling between 3 or 4 applications, dealing with incompatibilities or update issues. Getting you back to the creative process is our goal.

That is it. Importing takes some time, but done properly, you’ll be ahead of the game when it comes to editing efficiently. And as mentioned above, most of the settings you choose will be remembered from import to import - its automatic until you want to change it. Sweet!.

Have a great day.

Tags:Lightroom, Workflow, Tutorial

In the wake of Imaging USA, Peachpit Press has added a Lightroom Resource page that has a bunch of content for learning about how to use lightroom, both from a larger workflow integration standpoint and a "down and dirty" techniques perspective.

They include links to the two best Lightroom books, interviews with the authors and others using Lightroom in their professional work, and some great video tutorials.

The thing that really makes me love Lightroom even more than its efficiency is the great groundswell of enthusiast support - there are free resources all over the web that will get you into using Lightroom.

Not to be outdone, but O'Reilly's InsideLightroom blog posted a whole host of mini-tutorials as well...

Speaking of Learning and Lightroom, I should I remind you, if you are in the Greater Seattle area, you can take advantage of having yours truly custom tailor a Lightroom solution for your specific workflow at a very affordable price.

Tags:Lightroom, Workflow, Training

Found this on a blog I read periodically, and see it as quite useful.

I got a big print order in the mail late yesterday from my color lab (where I send my high volume work) and was upset with some of the quality. Furthermore, they took 3 extra days to get to me and I'm a bit miffed about the delay. Christmas is almost upon us and I've still got loads of work to do.

Happy Holiday!

Tags:Lightroom, Training, Workflow