I know I have covered bits and pieces of my editing process in Lightroom in several different posts. I thought I would sum it up here...

I normally get back into the office, download and import the images, add metadata then take a short break before the editing process begins. I would recommend that you edit your images in a series of steps unless you are under the gun and have to get a few images out immediately. The reason for this is we need a logical process and one that allows us to spend enough time with the images to really select the superstar images.

My first round of editing is a gut reaction to the images. I'll give any image I think worthy of consideration a 1 star rating on the first pass. If I run into images that are out of focus or have technical issues I'll hit the "X" key and mark them as rejects which will be deleted later. Once I have gone through the entire shoot and given the selects a one star I'll filter my shoot for those 1-star images and repeat this process upgrading the deserving images to 2-stars and so on. I use a star rating system because it affords more flexibility than using the flags or colors. And it lends itself nicely to the editing process I outline here. Normally, I will continue this culling process until at least 3 stars or until I feel like I have group of images I really need to process. In the 2-star round of editing I will start to give four and five star ratings to images that I am sure will be the AAA selects. While editing in the second and third rounds I tend to use the Compare View (see image at right) which allows you to look at your images critically and determine which of your two or three star images are the real winners. I don't really have any special meaning for the different ratings I use but in general a 5-star image is rare and these images almost always end up in my portfolio.

I heartily recommend that you take a break between rounds of editing. This will help you keep your sanity and give your eyes a break plus the more time you spend editing the better your edits. Photographers are not necessarily the best editors of their work. We get emotionally attached to images because of the situation, subject or some nostalgic experience we had while capturing an image. Be viscious while editing, look at your images with fresh eyes and judge them for what they are, not by what was happening when you shot the image or how much work it took to create that image.

To delete my "rejected" images, I filter for the rejects which is the flag with the "X" in it, then select all the images and hit delete. Lightroom has a series of steps one has to go through to delete images (which is good so you don't accidentally delete images) so I use the reject flag to mark those images I want to delete. This way I don't have to go through all the delete protocols with each image.

Once I have my images culled to the best of the best, I move onto the processing phase of my workflow which can take some serious time. I have found that images need a lot more attention than most people realize to really dial in the colors so an image will print nicely - especially if it is going to be printed in CMYK for editorial clients.

Because I want all of my images to look their best I try to get my selects down to a manageable number of images. For some long trips, where I have shot 3,000 to 10,000 images it is never going to be a manageable number so I just have to figure I'll be in front of the computer for a while dealing with those images. All just part of the job, but thankfully if I am diligent in the field and have access to electricity I can at least start importing and adding metadata on my laptop so that half the battle is over when I get back into the office.

Also, a note on saving your work. Saving your work in Lightroom is simple. You don't have to! Every time I teach a workshops on Lightroom one of the big questions that comes up again and again is how do I save my work? Lightroom saves everything you do into the Lightroom catalog - this is one of the main reasons for the import process. And if you have your preferences set to "Automatically save to XMP" in the catalog preferences then most everything you do in Lightroom in the Develop and Library module is saved as an XMP file right next to your raw file.

This by the way is an excerpt from my eBook, entitled Adobe Photoshop Lightroom:
A Professional Photographer's Workflow. I am in the process of updating the book for Lightroom Version 2.0 and the new version will become available when 2.0 ships or shortly thereafter. If you'd like to check it out click here.

That's it for this week. See you next week here at Inside Lightroom.

Adios, Michael Clark