Photo Processing

Posted by: Fast Air Photography Tags: Lightroom, Photographer Posted date: August 25, 2011 | 5 Comments

The short URL of the present article is: https://www.fast-air.co.uk/Jl14k

Photo processing For my visit to RAF Mildenhall on Monday 18th April I returned after twelve and half hours with 369 photos. Those hours were just the start. The photos will need to be reviewed, keyworded, processed and then uploaded to my website. I decided to keep a track on how long it took me to work through the photos.

This particular visit was slightly different as I was shooting a lot more prop aircraft (mostly C-130 Hercules or variants) and shooting with a low shutter speed to get a good amount of blur on the props. Whereas I would usually shoot between 3 to 6 photos per aircraft usually I was shooting between 8 to 12 to compensate for the higher number of shots that will be soft because of motion blur. This does mean more photos to deal with when I get home though.

Stage 1 – 27 minutes

Copy the photos onto my PC, import them into Lightroom, generate 1:1 previews (this saves time when I want to view them later) and applying the default metadata to the images.

Stage 2 – 60 minutes

Applying keywords to the photos. The actual process of applying keywords is very quick in Lightroom but the whole process takes 60 minutes because I need to identify the type and serials of each aircraft. When dealing with USAF serials it gets a bit harder as they truncate the serials when they apply them to the aircraft so rather than just applying the serial as displayed each one has to be looked up to fine the full serial. If there is a new aircraft type I’ve not shot before or a pod attached that I’ve come across I’ll have to research it. The pods are by far the worst thing to try to identify and can take a lot of searching.

Stage 3 – 43 minutes

Remove the photos that have cut part of the aircraft off, has something distracting in either the foreground or background or is soft / blurred. This is where generating the 1:1 previews in advanced helps as I can view the images at 1:1 to check how sharp the image is without waiting for the image to render.

Stage 4 – 20 minutes

Select the best image from duplicates and remove the others.

Stage 5 – 68 minutes

Apply a rating to the photos, crop them if needed and then process them. Each photo is processed individually, I don’t apply the same settings to multiple photos.

Stage 6 – 29 minutes

Create a web page for photos and add a write up or supporting text. Upload the photos.

Total – 247 minutes / 4 hours and 7 minutes

There are times I wished I shot JPEG!

I’d be interested to hear how this compares to other people.

About the author

Fast Air Photography

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5 Comments for Photo Processing

Adam Duffield

I follow almost the exact same steps with some slight differences.

Stage 1 – My machine is a bit slow and takes around 10 secs per 1:1 preview to render. Normally i leave it rendering overnight to try and compensate for it but still a pain. It can easily take and hour or 2 especially with a big airshow

Stage 2 – I only tend to keyword make, model and serial. At the start it took a while but now i have a good collection of existing keywords which makes things easier. Knowing where to look for missing serials also helps. I also try to remmeber to get a close up shot of the serial if i can (especially when shooting statics) to help with the process.

Stage 3 & 4 – i combine these normally. Agreed that the preview rendering really helps here

Stage 5 – i don’t rate the photo’s but normally select the best of the ‘keepers’ during stages 3 & 4. Processing time is around 5 mins an image maybe

Stage 6 – don’t have to worry about this (yet!! working on it!) but i do export the main edits out to photoshop to do a few things. I find it easier to check for dust spots in PS than LR. Also, i much prefer the sharpening control so resize and then sharpen in PS and save it to stack with the LR image ‘original’. This normally takes a minute or 2 per image as i have programmed actions that cuts the time down.

If you ignore stage 1, i would say it takes me about the same length of time. Hence the huge backlog of pictures i have at the moment!!!

Jesús López

Great post

I also work in LR and follow similar steps

I can not calculate the time it takes, since I work at times.
I leave Step 2 to the end of the process and work a little less ;-)

Rich Harley

My process is quite different.

Stage 1:Get back from the shoot, fire up the card reader, and put it in to a folder in the correct place in the tree, for example..

Commercial/Client/ShootName/Day(if multiple day shoot)/Camera(if usingmultiple bodies).

I don’t use keywords as I find this system sets me up quite nicely for easy recall, plus I never need to search by Serial with work (generally I know what plane I’m supposed to be aiming at ;)).

Stage 2: I use Quick View on my Mac (using Spacebar to check out the files), then use the Colour Label feature in Finder on to sort the files into preferences.

Stage 3: Fire up Adobe ACR (in Photoshop) so I can edit the files. I generally apply a batch command to correct for lighting, fill light etc, then go through and fine tune each photo individually. I do as much as possible in this stage.

Stage 4: This is optional – and this is the “proper” Photoshop stage.

Stage 5: In to our good friend Adobe Bridge, who sorts the photos by Edited and Cropped. Every photo requires a tiny crop I find, so filtering by Cropped is a good way to sort them out. This can then do a batch resize and JPG. I can also do batch noise reduction at this stage if I need to.

Stage 5: Upload to server for client download.

Pretty quick. I’ve turned around 50 photos (which I had cut down from 250 frames) in about 30 minutes before when time has been a big issue. I find this method means there’s no lag waiting for previews, quick to sort my images via labels, and just lets me get on with it.

Mark McGrath

I use LR to download my cards to destination drive, while importing them at the same time.

As for the rest, I tend to just look for images I like then edit these & then go back later and edit more. Hence why I still have loads of shots from late 2008 onwards that could do with being filtered.

Dirk Jan de Ridder

Interesting blog post, but please take into consideration that you are not gonna save time if you do stages 2, 3, 4 and 6 with JPEG images! From your 247 minutes to process this shoot, 152 of those would therefore take the same time with JPEGs. Stages 1 and 5 would take a little less time; let’s say 50% less. That would save you 47 minutes or 19% of your total time. For me, that difference would not weigh up to the advantages of shooting Raw..