Week 1
Matt’s Wildlife Course
Guided Edit Experience
Week 1 – Organizing and Culling
Hi all. Welcome to Week 1 of the Guided Edit Experience. Below is the replay of the live event. This week we covered some organizing and culling tips and tricks to help you get it done faster and get through your photos easier.
Feel free to leave any questions in the comments below.
Also, here is a mini PDF assignment for Week 1. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Enjoy!
🤦🏻♀️ This was my reaction after reading your reply — OF COURSE they don’t automatically open in LRC…they have to be imported! Thanks for the advice. I still will play around with LR….in the long run, it could be better (because I’m always having import issues!), but for now I’ll continue using LRc. This course is GREAT!! I’ve learned a ton! Thanks.
Which noise reduction is best? Have compared the results from Topaz Labs for RAW noise reduction compared to LRC noise reduction. I think Topaz is still doing a better job and preserving the sharpness.
Hopefully this helps: https://mattk.com/i-changed-my-noise-reduction-workflow-heres-why/
Hi Matt. I’m enjoying the course and these video recordings – I live in the UK where it’s 5 hours ahead of you.
Initial Culling – I’ve always done this in Bridge: is there any advantage to doing it in Lr instead?
Thanks,
John
Hi John. Culling is culling. It doesn’t matter where you do it as long as you have a way to mark your favorites and get rid of the bad ones. Use whatever works for you. Thanks.
Thanks Matt. I copy all images from memory card to disk, label the keeps with red, bin the rest, then import the keeps into LrC. Only after Time Machine backup on my iMac do I re-format the memory card. Your ideas on culling are already saving me time and I congratulate you on your communication skills (as well as your knowledge and experience). Yours, John
Went through week 1’s assignments. For the sloth, I cropped to a vertical image and added a linear gradient coming down from the top right to brighten the sloth’s face. Otherwise, I did similar to what you did. Oh, I have not done much with color correcting in the past.. Adjusting the green tint on the sloth was a great tip. I will have to go back to some of my sloth photos to adjust that color. Thanks!! The other 2 crops were just like yours. I must’ve had a great teacher. ;o).
This was indeed fun! Also, I loved the Ruthless Culling. I’ve been doing a version of it without rejecting everything first – I can see this being a huge time-saver!
The sloth photo opened in LR (I didn’t even know I had it downloaded on my laptop!!!).I’m fumbling around the editing screens…similar to, but not identical to LCR. is there a way to have this file open in LRC? I’m way more comfortable editing there!!! Based on what you said, I should probably convert…just hadn’t given it any thought and need to watch a class on the differences before committing to it!! I do struggle with importing/exporting and getting things to go where I want them to!!
Hi Claire. You can import it in to LRC just like every other photo you import. This photo would be no different.
Next, I don’t think you should convert and I believe I even said that in the webinar. If you don’t open LR and instantly love it, then why bother switching software? Wouldn’t you rather spend time on your photography, rather than messing around with new software? For me, I opened it and instantly liked it much more than LRC so it made sense for me. Hope that helps.
I normally would go through photos, hitting ‘x’ liberally. But… selecting the similar shots, ‘x’ing them all and then quickly scrolling through and just keeping the 1 or 2 keeperss — what a difference! I am going through pictures so much faster. This 1 hour class will save me more time than any other class I’ve taken.
It’s not so much that storage is or isn’t cheap. Why on earth do I want 125 pictures of almost the same thing? Pick one, move on.
I really like your approach to culling and have adopted the ruthless method. I used to do something similar with selecting photos that were similar but only rejected the photos that were either blurry or where the composition was obviously problematic. Then I went through an iterative process to get down to the photos I really wanted to keep. Very time consuming and so I do have shoots on my HD that I’ve not culled at all. I’m going to revisit those folders and use the ruthless method on them. Thank you.
The editing exercise was very interesting. I like the chiaroscuro look for dark images like this. I changes the white balance to fix the greenish cast. Used the subject mask to selectively brighten the sloth a touch and used the radial gradient to emphasise the shaft of light coming through the leaves to give the image a moodier feel. I cropped for rule of thirds leaving a little more space in the direction the sloth is looking.
I use Photo Mechanic to quickly download images and do a first culling. It adds an extra step but if you are downloading a lot of images it is worth it.
Thanks. I’m curious though… What advantage does it have over what I showed considering it costs $150 just to look at photos with photo mechanic, and the method I showed is just as fast and free.
Leave any questions below.
What do you use to save instead of hard drives? I seriously need to delete and save.
Hi Nedra. I’m not sure where you heard me say I don’t use hard drives. That’s all I save my photos on.