I'd like to follow up on the thought process that my esteemed Inside Lightroom colleague, Michael Clark, detailed back in July, 2008, A Logical Editing Process. In that article, he spoke mostly about the culling and rating portion of his post-shoot workflow. And, while he makes excellent recommendations, my needs are a bit different.

I'm principally an event shooter; specifically most of my work is at horse shows. My goal at any shoot is to maximize the number of usable photos I can put in front of my potential clients. Like many photographers, I use a web-based gallery and print fulfillment lab. My on-site advertising is directed to steering the horse show participants, their friends and relatives, and other attendees to this website as soon as possible after the event. Ideally, I'd like to have the processed images available at 8:00 AM the following morning.

In Michael's article, his workflow is directed toward finding and perfecting the 'best of the best'. My goal, by contrast, is maximizing the number of simply acceptable images, and that's what I'd like to talk about today.

I'll finish the day's shooting with anywhere from 500 to 2,000 Canon CR2 files. I'll use Lightroom's "Copy to a new location and import" method to bring the images both into Lightroom, and into my preferred folder/filename structure, as well as sending backup copies to a tertiary drive. (I'll burn those to optical as well, later.) Typically, I find the DNG import conversion a little too slow for my turnaround time needs, and put that off until later, when it's not on the schedule critical path. I will have prepared a metadata preset for the day's event, generally containing my copyright information, a generic caption for all the images, location data, and a few keywords applicable to the entire shoot.

It's at this point where I'll start to deviate from Michael's workflow. I'll assign every image a default rating of 3 stars at import time. A rating of 3 will be my minimum for displaying images to potential clients. For the purposes of this article, I'll ignore some Library module work that I do: organizing the images by competition divisions, tagging specific participants, and the like. I'll shift to Develop module and begin at the very beginning. If I have any shoot-wide corrections to make, I'll apply them now. Since I've adopted the beta release camera-matching profiles, this operation is almost a thing of the past.

Starting with image #1, I'll work my way through all the images, rating and adjusting as I go. If I've managed my field work and the import process correctly, the bulk of my adjustments are cropping/framing, and when required, a bump to fill-light in order to recover shadowed faces. (The brims of riding helmets and western style hats tend to be my worst enemy.) Simultaneously, I'll be making a rating judgment on the image. Don't forget that I've already rated every image at 3 stars during import.

I have several objectives to satisfy here, which I'll accomplish with a combination of flags and stars:

X flag - Rejected. This image is technically unacceptable, and is to be deleted (catalog and disk).
1 star - Technically acceptable, but has no commercial potential. Generally, these are place marker shots, or clock shots to help me organize the remainder of the images. I also include here shots that I consider may be embarrassing to a participant. Can't make much money making people look bad, but sometimes clients are interested, particularly if it's spectacularly bad. I'll handle those separately.
2 stars - Technically acceptable or better, but off-topic. Not likely to be commercial for this event. Things like incidental people, flora or fauna, low flying aircraft, or other photographer’s eye candy. These will be re-cataloged and re-rated at a later date.
3 stars - Technically acceptable and commercially viable. I wouldn't be embarrassed to sell this picture.
4 stars - An excellent picture of the subject. I'm proud of the image, but it's likely only commercial in the context of the event.
5 stars - Just a great picture, a portfolio keeper. It's very commercially viable in relation to the event, and usable elsewhere.

After processing and rating all the images, I'll take a peek to verify the rejects and delete them. I'll then filter on picked and unflagged images rated three stars and higher. I'll export these as high quality JPGs to event specific organizational folders, by selecting on pertinent keywords applied early in the process. These folders are then uploaded directly to the gallery/print fulfillment site, using their proprietary client software. Once uploaded and verified, I can delete these derivative JPG files, as the website client automatically maintains the proper resolution files for thumbnails and print requirements. My nightly auto back-up process will catch the catalog changes, along with the image files and their XMP sidecars.

From camera to cash register in just a few hours.