Picking Pix to Keep

[waldenl]

What do people use in the keep/discard step in a workflow? I'm

looking for something that will _quickly_ show me my images from a

shooting session and allow me to make a keep/discard decision. Part

of the key is a quick draw of the images. I'm looking for something

that will "snap" the images onto the screen so I'm making quick

reactionary decisions. I don't want to analyze each image, I want a

gut feeling and move on. Each image should take me less than a

second to decide, probably more on the scale of 1/10 of a second.

Problem is, everything I've seen does a progressive draw of the

image, or doesn't allow delete.

 

Ideally I would be able to "flag" something for deletion so when I

get to the end I can go back and say, "well, nothing blew me away on

subject x, but I need a shot of subject x, so what's best."

 

-Walden

[olav_s]

Hi there,

 

I have looked for a similar program too. I found that Nikon digital cameras's Nikon Browser is very decent for that purpose. It load in the jpgs thumbnail pretty quick. It also is quick to delete the obvious bad ones like way out of focus, serverly under/over exposed, or blocked len from a table of pictures's thumbnails. It also allows rotatings. Then if I double clicking on one of the thumbnail will open into its own window at a bigger size, thus allows me to weed out the subtle bad ones. This second window also allows me to go on to the next picture and delete from there as well. Its limitation is that it will only read jpegs, tiffs and nefs, but not bmps or other raws format.

 

Before that, I was using a free program that, when you hit enter, it'll put the pictures into full screen mode and I could just click to advance to the next picture while deleting as I go. This program is called IrfanView and is available at http://www.irfanview.com/ (I tried to confirm the link but this url was unacessable to me at the moment.) It did have thumbnails but they're very slow. The program itself is flexible and can read many many files. I still uses Irfanview in additional to Nikon Browser.

 

I hope this help with your goal.

[olav_s]

I also heard good things about this program. That is, if you dont mind spending $50.

 

http://www.photools.com/

 

There is a demo of the Imatch program. Check it out!

[anthony_m1]

Walden, here is what I do and what I use.

When I download a CF card, I first save the images to a CDR. 2nd, I use

Photoshop CS's file browser to decide what to keep on my hard drive. I am

very, very picky knowing that I have all of the digi negatives on CD. I eliminate

each pick by a flag system in PS CS. It works. Then when I am done flagging, I

select all flagged and hit delete. Then I batch rename all the keepers with

metadata info. It works for me and seems to be very quick. Hope it helps a

little. <P>Oh, another thing that has recently helped me dramatically: I just

upgraded to a 20" monitor and it shows you a bunch of thumbnails which aids

in seeing everything at once.

AJM

[jon_austin]

I use the excellent freeware utility, IrfanView (www.irfanview.com).

 

When you open any image file in any folder, you can quickly step forwards and backwards through all the image files in the folder, by clicking on the left and right arrows in the toolbar, or by using the left and right cursor keys, or by using the Page Up and Page Down keys.

 

IrfanView offers a variety of viewing options, and you can delete the image displayed simply by pressing the Delete key.

 

IrfanView also has a Thumbnail mode (just press T) with an optional directory (folder) tree view; you scroll through the images, change the size of the thumbnails, and also delete the highlighted image(s) in this view by pressing the Delete key.

 

One of my favorite features of IrfanView is the ability to quickly open the displayed image in the editor of your choice, by pressing Shift-E. Even during heavy Photoshop editing sessions, I still keep IrfanView open to the target folder, for quick and easy navigation.

 

I usually copy all my images from camera to PC storage, then pick the keepers before erasing the images in camera storage. That way, I still have a backup, in case a twitchy finger deletes an image too quickly!

[www.philwinterphotography.]

I use Breezebrowser to do the initial edit. I first down load all my RAW images from the camera. Breezebrowser will display CRW (Canon RAW) files as large thumbnails, but double clicking displays a large view. I then make a pass deleting the obvious bad images - bad exposures, out of focus, etc. Then I put all the rest on a CD. Then I make a more critical pass, and convert the good images to tifs. BreezeBrowser does a good job of the RAW conversion, too. Once I have the tifs, I remove the CRWs from my hard drive after MAKING SURE I have them on a CD. Hope this helps.

 

Phil

[anthony_m1]

Phil, at what point do you adjust your raw image data? I would imagine once you convert raw to tiff that you would lose the ability to control post processing to some degree. Do you access your CD-R or do you work strictly from TIFF files?

[imaginator]

Try to avoid making decisions from thumbnails... even larger ones. I have made this mistake and many images that look weak in a thumb version come alive at larger sizes. Smaller details make the difference. I don't have the kind of workflow that would relate to what you need (still learning, no hurry...) but I have found thumbnails useless for making decisions about images, and only use them later to help locate an image quickly... I'm even considering re-doing my webpages without thumbs.