LIBRARY - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 76

Organizing your photos in Library
At er importing photos into the catalog it's time to edit the shoot. h e goal is
to go from the many images captured during a session to only the few, best
photographs—those chosen to continue through the processing pipeline. h e
photo editing process is iterative: we review photos in multiple passes of editing
until they are distilled down to the i nal selects .

3

SIMPLE EDITING WORKFLOW
During each round of editing, decide whether each image stays or goes. “Maybes”
stay, at least for the current round. Try to look at the photographs as if someone else
made them. Be your own toughest critic—you have too many good shots to waste
time on bad ones! Move through your editing quickly, without over-analyzing.
But also learn from your failures by going back to study them later. Is the shot
successful or not? Does it have less-than-obvious potential that can be brought
out in processing? Clearly dei ne your reasons for giving each photo a thumbs-up
or thumbs-down. Use the fundamentals of photography to make your choices:
interesting subject or theme, strong composition, good exposure, etc.

Evaluate similar photographs heuristically (ranked in ascending order) to
determine the best—and ignore the rest. Don't fret over your decisions. You can
always come back later to coni rm your initial choices—and you always have the
prerogative to change your mind. For each pass, the editing steps are:

1. Review: evaluate the photographs on their strengths and potential.
Concentrate on simply deciding if each photograph works or it doesn't.

2. Rate: apply Lightroom attributes (stars, labels and/or l ags) to
dif erentiate selects from rejects.

3. Save: save Lightroom attributes and metadata to the image i les on disk.

4. Filter: show only those selects that have survived the current round.

5. Repeat: continue editing until only your best work remains.

h ese steps are i rst explained in basic terms. h en the remainder of this chapter
explains each task in detail.

Don't use the Previous Import source for editing
Following an import, switch to the Folder source to edit the photos. h e Previous
Import source doesn't provide the full set of options that a folder does. (Both are
discussed later in this chapter.)