Workflow

I was curious with what methods people use for editing 400+ images after games.

I have a pretty good system for my college lacrosse images because its usually

only one game a week, however I am starting to do youth stuff which means I have

multiple games in a weekend that I am needing to get edited and put online. I

use photoshop and I am starting to use more actions and batch processing to make

the system go faster and save some time. What else is everyone doing?

I use a three-step process since I moved to CS3. First, I review everything with Nikon View

NX where I assign a single star to the keepers. I typically shoot over a thousand frames in

a hockey (or other) game. View NX is pretty fast and I can get through them in fairly short

order. I then select all of the starred photos and move them to a folder called 'selects'.

 

Once that's done, I open Bridge. I'll use that to open all of them images in Camera Raw.

Once in Camera raw, I can do bulk adjustments to color temp, saturation, etc. and then

save all of the adjusted files. Back in Bridge, I then open the individual files I may need to

work with in Photoshop.

 

Depending on how good my exposures and white balance was when I was shooting, I can

usually get through a game in a couple of hours max - usually a lot less.

I start in Bridge... I run through & assign a star to the initial keepers, and filter the view to only show me those. Then, in Camera Raw, I do the adjustments, including a crop... many times, there will be a specific set of things that most need the same amount of (or close to it), so I'll either just save the adjustments as a preset & apply it to the rest, or do it on the first one, select the rest (unless some clearly don't need it), and choose "previous conversion" from the development settings. This gets me to a pretty good starting point in most cases. Then, I just select 20 or so at a time, fine tune individually in Camera Raw, then use Image Processor from Bridge to batch process all of it at once, making jpg files for web galleries. This might sound like a lot of dancing, but a few thousand frames from the day go by pretty quickly when you've got a routine down, and they're ready for posting in no time.

I have had a problem with Lightroom and noone has been able to help me. I can send the original image or a copy from LR to CS3. When I try to send a copy with LR adjustments, it hangs up. I've even left it on overnight but it still will say "preparing file for editing". Anyone?

As I understand it...CS3 and Bridge can not read the adjustments made in LR and vice versa. They are in a different format.

 

Standby and I'll dig up my source that explains how to deal with it but I'm sure someone will chime in with the solution in the meantime.

 

Gord

Hi Victoria,

 

Ok, found it. LR stores all the adjustments you make in it's catalogue. Thing is Bridge and CS3 can not read the LR catalogue so it doesn't see the changes you made.

 

No changes are ever written to a RAW file and remains unchanged. It merely references the xmp data to see what you did.

 

In LR open up CATALOG SETTINGS" then select "Metadata" and then select "automatically write to XMP". LR will then write the adjustments you make to an XMP file which is read by BR and CS3.

 

You have the same issue the other way and once I gleam the info out of it I'll send it to you.

 

I found the info in a Podcast I have but unfortunately as I have to use itunes to see it I have no idea what it is called or where it is on my computer as iTunes doesn't even show the title or file even though it's on my machine. (I HATE MACs Thank god I don't use one)

 

Hope that gives you an idea.

 

Gord

Sorry guess that should have been directed to Ron..

Hi Ron

 

See if this gets you there

 

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?i=23198605&id=124921198

 

Should be a link to the podcast I was talking about

 

G.

Thanks everyone! Do you all shoot raw for big sporting events, or do you shoot jpeg when you know you will have a ton of images from an event?

I'd shoot RAW regardless...ESPECIALLY when I know 'll have a ton to review & process...that's where I've found ACR/Bridge to be my best friends! After getting used to the workflow, I just haven't found a good reason to shoot jpgs anymore, even for snapshots...raw just makes things easier more flexible, at least for me, in the big picture(pun not intended).

Victoria, when I shoot weddings, portraits, events, etc., it's always RAW. I never shoot RAW

when shooting sports, though. Fewer frames per card, longer write times and your buffer

fills up too fast (especially at 8fps). Plus, if you're doing your job on exposure, shooting RAW

won't get you much.

Gord, thanks for the response. I tried your suggestion, still no go. It just hangs the comp. up "preparing file for editing". Doesn't matter if the file copy will be jpg or psd. I've downloaded and reinstalled this numerous times, same story. Are there maybe common files that I should have removed manually? I seem to remember seeing something about that, maybe it wasn't this app.