ULTIMATE Photography Editing Workflow: I spent 10 YEARS perfecting this ten-step workflow!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 พ.ค. 2024
- It took me TEN YEARS to perfect my efficient photography workflow based on my experience as a sports photographer - and now, I'm going to share it with you!
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www.speedyphotographer.com
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** SOFTWARE IN THIS VIDEO **
BackBlaze: bit.ly/3aMq9h7
** MY RECORDING GEAR **
Canon R6: geni.us/g3fjbkF
Canon 24-70 f/2.8: geni.us/kBTH
Canon 16-35 f/4: geni.us/Gbcg68P
Sony a6500: geni.us/rR3CNVg
Sigma 16mm f/1.4 Lens: geni.us/YQfQLAo
Manfrotto 055 Tripod: geni.us/RtWu
Manfrotto 502 Video Head: geni.us/Btr1
Oktava MK-012-01 Microphone: geni.us/uKRLZNA
Glide Gear TMP100 Teleprompter: geni.us/Gga7A
Godox SL-60W LED Light: geni.us/zRuwx
Newwer 36" Softbox: geni.us/kCdh
These are affiliate links, which pay me a small commission when you buy something. If you choose to do so, I greatly appreciate it!
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** CHAPTERS **
0:00 Introduction
0:28 Ingest and Culling Software
2:08 Editing Software
5:05 Backup Software
7:05 My Editing Workflow
11:18 Conclusion
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** SHORTENED TRANSCRIPT **
So, photography software can fall under one of three categories: ingest and culling, editing, and backup software.
First, we’re going to start by looking at ingest and culling software. This is software designed to help you get your pictures off your memory card and onto your computer. It can also help with file management, image tagging, and very basic editing tasks.
Two of the most popular ingest and culling softwares are Photo Mechanic and Adobe Bridge. Photo Mechanic is a standalone piece of software, while Adobe Bridge is included as part of the Adobe Creative Suite. One other popular and cheaper alternative is FastRawViewer, which offers about 90% of the same functionality.
All of these programs cost money, which leads me to a popular question: why would I pay for culling and ingesting software when I can just use my editing software?
There are two huge reasons:
Number one: Photo Mechanic can load preview files instantly. In the same amount of time it takes me to zoom in to 100% in Lightroom, I can cycle through an entire album in Photo Mechanic. And it’s not like I don’t have enough computer power for Lightroom.
Number two: Photo Mechanic can automatically apply file naming conventions using variables, metadata and copyright information while ingesting. This is how I manage to optimize all of my images for my website, helping me to increase my page ranking and land on the first page of Google Search results.
Alright, so the second type of photography software is used for editing. This is the software designed to help you with the creative part of your photography - adjusting color, contrast, saturation, and everything else. And as I just mentioned, editing software will also include some basic ingest and culling features - but nothing as fast as a tool like Photo Mechanic or Adobe Bridge.
Two of the most popular editing softwares are Adobe Lightroom and Capture One. Capture One is a standalone piece of software, while Lightroom is included as part of the Adobe Creative Suite.
Now hold on - some of you are thinking, what about Adobe Photoshop?
One of the common misconceptions when it comes to photography is that you need to be using Photoshop to edit your images.
The reality is that you should only be using Photoshop in very specific situations. This is because of the difference between pixel and parametric editing software.
Lightroom is a parametric photo editor. When I increase the exposure of my picture by +1.5, Lightroom records this as an instruction, but the original file stays the same. I can close Lightroom completely, come back to it later, and reset my exposure by undoing it. This is called a non-destructive edit.
Photoshop is a pixel photo editor. When I increase the exposure of my picture by +1.5, Photoshop applies the adjustment directly to the image. If I want to close Photoshop, I have to save the image and fully commit to the change. This means that if I open Photoshop later, I can’t reset the exposure by undoing it. This is called a destructive edit.
Finally, the third type of photography software is used for backups.
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** TAGS **
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This is great info, as a professional sports photographer myself I can honestly say the workflow described here is nearly perfect, and implementing any or all of what is shown here will speed up anyone's photography process. Thanks for sharing!
Gavin, I've had a look through your awesome portfolio - that feedback means a lot. Thanks, and glad you found it helpful!
completely agree.
I am going thought a lot of workflows videos and this is the best one so far.
Kevin is so clear and direct. Amazing work!
appreciate it, glad it was helpful!
Kevin! You are one of the very few best TH-camrs I’ve ever watched! Very informative! Well made! Easy to understand! Straight to the point! No BS! Thank you very much!!!
really appreciate it :)
Great info! I definitely need an effective workflow and it seems like you got it. Thanks!
Wow. This video just made every other related tutorial redundant. Thank you so much for the good-good content.
Thanks Chris, I appreciate it - glad it was helpful
Excellent! Exactly what I was looking for. I just needed to see someone's workflow in PM. I have been using Bridge for that purpose but, I like the idea of using PM for setting up ingest templates for team activities. Thanks for the great and to-the-point info.
No problem, glad to hear it was helpful!
Great video. Straigth to the topic, no nonsense. Love how effective your workflow is. Subscribed.
thanks, appreciate it!
This is awesome!!! You've helped me so much! I learned more than i expected.
Glad it was helpful!
Wow this is great info! Super helpful. Just what I needed. I’ve been trying to level up on my work flow and data storage. My early naive self thought I only needed a backup hard drive. Ha! Thanks for the info on Photo Mechanic, first time hearing of it.
Glad it was helpful!
Great workflow and straight to the point explanations. I will copy some of these from you. Thank you! :)
Glad it was helpful!
Brilliant!
man your workflow is extremely efficient! not an idle second. thank you for the tips.
appreciate it and glad it was helpful!
spot on, really appreciate the no bs approach. Not one time did I feel like you were milking the video to fill the time requirement.
glad it was helpful!
This is quality. I found so much value in this one video I'm headed over to his website to take part in the one hour free training and possibly buy his training. It looks super comprehensive
Glad it was helpful!
this one is really good, thank you!
appreciate it!
Thank for the video, and especially the back up part. Even pros don’t have a clue about RAID storage and using the 3-2-1 back up scheme.
As for editing and culling software. We switched to Capture One and Affinity Photo 6 months ago. We haven’t looked back. Capture One’s raw engine is unmatched. No need to use multiple software for culling and editing. It’s crazy fast and we editing in raw, with layers, 97% of the time. We chose the perpetual license. Crazy.
great video, love the detail that you went into!
Glad you liked it!
Excellent. You can use Adjustment Layers in Photoshop to do a non-destructive work but, no doubt, LR or even C1 are better, fast to change and all adjustments in one file, no need to save as Tiff or PSD.
Someone may have posted this earlier, so I apologize for missing it. Question, how did you generate your camera profiles for your R6? Did you manually do that by color correcting a Raw file next to it's jpeg equivalent?
If you have a video covering this please point me to it 😔
Thanks
Good content, very helpful! Thank you!
No problem, glad it helped!
Are familiar with ACDSee and Zone photo or on1raw? I believe they are the best options for scaled execution.
Thank you for this!
Not a problem
Can you make a tutorial video series that breaks this process down and takes us step by step on how to do this? Or do you have any recommendations for existing courses that can teach this?
While some of these steps are self-explanatory, I break down some of the more complicated ones and can answer any of your questions through my photography program, if you're interested. Here's a link to Speedy Photographer:
www.speedyphotographer.com
This is brilliant. Thank you so much. Do you have any videos on Lightroom and catalog management?
Glad it was helpful! No other videos on this topic right now on TH-cam unfortunately
subbed, super informative from the start
glad it was helpful!
This is pure gold! Thanks for sharing. I am using Lightroom to import photos and it takes SO long. Will try bridge. Where do you keep your Lightroom catalog? In hard drive or cloud storage? Any tips for importing photos to my hard drive using MAC? Thanks for sharing!!!
Glad it was helpful! I keep my catalog in the cloud, but if you're not switching between computers, it isn't necessary. I don't really have any suggestions that would make this process different on a Mac - pretty much identical on both platforms.
This is so insanely helpful to me as a new photographer. I feel like I'm always drowning in photos. I was starting to feel like I should slow down my camera's burst rate so I have less to go through, but I think photo mechanic is going to be a life saver for me and my cloud storage.
Burst speeds are reaching the point where I feel the need to slow them down as well (and sometimes I do) - easiest way to speed up literally everything as a part of this workflow!
Bravo.....this is really good info! I am subscribing now!
Thanks, glad you found it helpful!
Brilliant!
I'm pretty OCD, but your workflow takes it to the next level. You also introduce some software that many of us probably haven't heard of. I'm planning to look up Photo Mechanic and Goodsync.
Huge thanks and best wishes!
J
Much appreciated!
Super Helpful Information.
Glad it was helpful!
Awesome, job! I like you motivation.
Glad it was helpful!
I like your comments upon photo editors in another video could you address Windows machines as to how much horsepower do you need such as processor memory graphics and so forth
Very usefull.
I see all my fav sports photogs using sum cord going ? Ring side court side etc ? Is,this to a hd ? Seems faster ?
Great video. One question: When you crop in photo mechanic is it a "destructive edit" or is the full picture preserved and can be un or re-cropped again?
full picture is preserved, as long as you don't export as a JPEG
Do you have a video on your b lightroom export settings?
Gosh.....Wish I watched this on July 3rd, 2020 lol. Thank you for the incredible insight.
I appreciate it, and glad it was helpful!
For backup I use amazon photos as a prime subscriber which has unlimited storage for JPG and Sony RAW files workmas well (don't know about Canon, Nikon etc) and also comes with a Windows software that can auto-backup your files
Good alternative!
Hey thanks for the video! Can you tell me why you prefer Photo mechanic over Adobe Bridge?
Totally a personal preference, I just really like the workflow when it comes to adding variables and IPTC metadata. Bridge is great too, I tend to use it a lot when I need to deal with video.
You are Mr. Efficient !!
Excellent video!
Thank you very much!
This is brilliant
thanks, I appreciate it!
@@kevinraposo more than welcome
SO helpful and thorough - thank you for putting this together! Just to clarify - you are copying (not moving) your tagged pictures from PM to Lightroom ?
neither copying nor moving - literally just importing the images from where they already exist on my hard drive. glad it was helpful!
Your workflow looks similar to mine, including your naming conventions, etc. The video is right to the point. I didn't see Bridge in your workflow...? I wonder what your opinion of Bridge vs. Photo Mechanic is 2 years later, and whether it's still worth the money to buy Photo Mechanic?
personally, still prefer photo mechanic for the metadata. bridge has caught up in terms of processing speed, but IPTC is best dealt with in Photo Mechanic still if you ask me
Nice job. I don't use Lightroom but the overall video was helpful. I would HIGHLY recommend that you create a local copy of your Lightroom catalog at least monthly.
Agreed, backups are critical. Glad you enjoyed it.
Is there a free ingest and sorting software that can be used?
Hi Kevin. Thanks for sharing. Do you prefer Autoretouch, an AI-powered image editing tool to automate ghost mannequins, clipping path, background removal, etc. image editing process? I found it super cool and easy to operate. Need your opinion regarding this.
Never used it, so unfortunately, I can't comment
To join Speedy Photographer or watch my FREE training:
www.speedyphotographer.com
You can follow me here:
instagram.com/kevinraposo
instagram.com/speedyphotographer
How come you only need to connect your drives to Backblaze once a year? I thought it would delete your backup after 30-days, even if you have a 1-year version history. Can you please comment? Thanks!
Read about the BackBlaze versioning system and how it works here:
help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035247494-Version-History-FAQ
Does anyone use camera raw instead of lightroom? The programs are so similar
I use Camera RAW for individual edits, but Lightroom is significantly faster when it comes to dealing with bulk edits
Wouldn't using a layer in photoshop create a non-destructive editing environment?
I probably should have expanded on that comment in the video. You're right, there are definitely a few ways to non-destructively edit in Photoshop - filters, layer masks, etc. But compared to Lightroom, many of the actions performed will be destructive
You forgot to drop the mic at the end of your video ! ;) Great job !
lol, I appreciate it!
Bridge is free
What about all these nba shooters appearing to shoot tethered or ?
Tethered shooting is pretty common at major international sporting events (i.e. the World Cup or the Olympics), where wire agencies have a dedicated editing team to cull and distribute real-time content. Makes for a cool configuration, but probably wouldn't be a useful tutorial for 99.99% of photographers watching this video on TH-cam
So, Photo Mechanic is nowhere near as useful _after_ you've dumped your images off your card and onto the computer or external hard-drive? In other words, it _only_ works the best at/during *_ingest?_* Is that correct?
Photo Mechanic is useful for any type of bulk data management/IPTC metadata at any point throughout your process
How,do,I,send from my cam to beat the iPhoto peeps ?canon 1dxii but guess I’ll trade down or up to a r6 for wifi efffff canon eerrrr 😝
Kevin, Great video. Instead of going from Photomechanic to LighRoom, I go from PhotoMechanic to Camera RAW in Photoshop. You can do virtually everything in Camera RAW that you can do in LightRoom, including nondestructive toning, but it's a lot more efficient. As a photojournalist, I am mostly toning, doing noise reduction. cropping and some geometry. You can mass apply/sync settings. You can this with hundreds of images at once. If pick DONE, it saves the edits and you can come bsck and change them later.. Pick the ones you want and export them all at once in the resolution you want. I do like Lighroom for HDR and a couple other things but deadline work CameraRaw is the way to go. If you shoot JPEGs, you can have cameraRAW treat them the same way.
I didn't explain this fully in the tutorial, but I do something very similar inside Lightroom - I apply very basic adjustments (i.e. adding a bit of contrast or exposure), then sync across all images. I've never given the Camera RAW workflow a shot, but it definitely appears to be a lot more lightweight to me than Lightroom is - may try it out in the future. Appreciate it!
@@kevinraposo Thanks for the reply Kevin. Yes, its way more lightweight then Lightroom. I export from Camera Raw to my "today" folder never opening the files in photoshop at all. I then return to PhotoMechanic to finish the captions. Clearly, if I was a portrait photographer or something else, the pictures would need more work and Lightroom would be more advantagous.
Photoshop should be used in a non destructive way (smart objects, camera raw filter, adjustment layers). Lightroom library works best if you stick to it with all imports and movements of files.
Are you a native English speaker? I thought the stress in the verbs "to impOrt/expOrt" is on the 2nd syllable
Kind of weird thing to comment on
Are you an English teacher ?
@@1994ave why? just curious
@@jennvangeem2847 yep, used to work with pupils for several years, but now just a freelancer (photographer, retoucher)
@@jennvangeem2847 I'm not a native speaker, btw, so just curious
Oh my gosh. As a photography idiot and drone newbie this will significantly cut down on the non-productive frustrating tasks while I'm getting my practice reps in.
glad it was helpful!
I liked your video a lot, but i must say, if you are working in photoshop and working destructively, you are simply using Photoshop wrong. If you do not use layers, you propably dont need photoshop and can stay in lightroom or capture one.. But if you do open photoshop there is no reason to not create new layers often.
beside that you nailed everything.
fair point. glad you enjoyed the video
Wanted deeper
Why not using usb drives? much more handy, imho
Not as fast or reliable as a dedicated hard drive
Wow, great information but way too fast for me. I know I can stop and start and review anytime I want to, but this is still a lot of information.
glad it was helpful, just place the video on repeat 🙂
Ok, why don’t you name them effectively?
This is so wrong! Photo editing involves sorting and culling. Processing is what photoshop does.
you're the first viewer in two and a half years to suggest my explanation is wrong, and I've had numerous professionals respond to this video very positively. regardless, you're pointing out semantics and it really doesn't matter, the workflow itself is valid
NOPE...using a smart object in Photoshop is non-destructive.
That’s the one and only non-destructive feature in an otherwise fully destructive editing software