the daily flashkube

1/50 f/3.5 ISO 800 Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6)

As I said in the beginning, these tips are from Scott Kelby’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers. I highly recommend this book for anyone learning LR2. That being said…

This tip is a kind of counter-recommendation. Kelby’s workflow goes something like this (highly simplified):

1. Import.
2. Flag or reject.
3. Delete rejected.
4. Make a collection out of the flagged.
5. Flag the best of the collection.
6. Make a collection out of the best in the collection.
7. Continue working within collections until output stage.

In step six, he ends up putting the very best of each collection in another collection of the same name but with the word “selects” after it. For example, he would have a collection called Example AND a collection called Example Selects at the same level.

I have tried his method with a few of my shoots and have switched back to using folders instead. Here are my reasons:

• The makers of Lightroom clearly intended for photographers to work in folders most of the time. I worry that a future version of Lightroom will implement a feature that assumes folders and collections are used as intended, thereby causing me to have to make modifications to my workflow. Here are some good uses for collections:
  • Showing images to clients for review without them seeing how the sausage is made.
  • Grouping images from different folders.
  • Grouping images that are normally printed or exported together.
• I don’t like the idea of the two collections being at the same level. I organize everything in my life hierarchically and expect my photographs to be no different. It is possible to create a Collection Set and put the normal and selects collections under it, but that just seems like too much hassle for every shoot.
• I am an IT professional who appreciates that technology advances. I have to assume that inevitably something better than Lightroom will come along and I’ll most likely switch to it. When I do, I want my files named descriptively, I want my folders named descriptively, and I want those folders to have descriptively named subfolders. If I do all this using collections, I am unnecessarily locking myself into LR. Don’t get me wrong, I think LR is the best tool out there right now to manage the entire photographic workflow. If you didn’t notice, the key words in that sentence were “right” and “now.”
• By working in collections alone, you lose the ability to stack similar shots. For example, if I shoot portraits of the same exact pose of the same exact person, it is useful to stack them together for later review. You can’t do this currently in collections, only when working in folders.
• Collections reset your flags so you can further refine your picks (I think this is why Kelby prefers collections). Unfortunately, when you edit in Photoshop, the flag you chose in the collection does not get applied to the resulting PSD as it does in folders. You have to go back and flag the PSD manually.

Now for some praise. Kelby has a deeply insightful suggestion about star ratings that I have come to appreciate. Don’t use them. The reality is that you want to get to the very best photographs in your shoot. Star ratings muddy this goal by giving you the ability to mark photographs as great, good, so-so, etc. I can tell you from experience that this is counter-productive and will waste much of your time. If you need a rating system in addition to flags and colors, use the star rating system as I do: treat it as if there are only two choices, one star or five stars. My workflow only differs from Kelby’s in that I work in folders instead of collections and I use stars just like flags. Here it is:

1. Import by date with descriptive folder names and descriptive file names.
2. If multiple shoots on the same day, create descriptively named sub-folders and move files into them.
3. Using flags, choose picks and rejects.
4. Delete rejects.
5. Filter by picks.
6. Using a single star, mark favorites of the picks.
7. Filter by a single star.
8. Using all five stars, mark the single best image from the shoot.

This is a much simplified description of the actual process (and leaves out keywording). You should really buy the book to understand when to use the various viewing modes during this stage of editing.