Google| Subject | Re: converting raw images from Canon EOS 600D |
| From | Floyd L. Davidson |
| Date | 2013-12-01 05:10 (2013-11-30 19:10) |
| Message-ID | <87vbz9jjo1.fld@apaflo.com> |
| Client | |
| Newsgroups | rec.photo.digital |
| Follows | Tony Cooper |
| Followups | Savageduck (20m) |
Tony Cooper <tonycooper214@gmail.com>wrote:
Tony CooperWell, not really. I've been aware since I was a teenager that I am able to very rapidly sort images (paintings, photos, whatever) based on what I like (emotional impact of viewing). The problem was that I had no idea, as a teenager, what exactly caused me to like any given image. And it really wasn't until I was well into my 30's that I started to get a handle on that.
On Sat, 30 Nov 2013 13:11:55 -0900, floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L. Davidson) wrote:Tony CooperFor the high-volume photographer, organization for selection is the most time-consuming aspect. If that photographer took 1,000 shots of an event, reviewing those 1,000 shots and determining which are worthy of efforts in post is the part that takes up time. The actual post work on the individual shots is minimal if the photographer has decent skills using the camera.Floyd L. Davidson
Bullshit son. I use a highly modified version of a very old program called XV to sort images. Going through 1000 pictures takes about 15 to 20 minutes at most. Just about 1 per second, more or less.
The only way you can effectively sort through 1,000 images at one per second and critically evaluate the images with an eye to which will be processed, which will be kept but not processed, and which will be binned immediately is to have multiple images of a low number of shots. All you'd be doing is picking the best of a multiple series.
Of course to see photographs before you take them pretty much requires knowing what it is in a scene that causes the effects in an image that result in the emotional response to visual observation. I've spent the last 30 years very slowly developing that. And since the middle 1990's digital photography has helped enormously, probably because of the rapid feedback but perhaps also related to the huge resources that are available on the Internet to help develop concepts and stimulate creativity.
The end effect is that today I've got a well developed sense of exactly what I want to see in a photograph, even if it will take hours of work to make it the prominent characteristic of the finished product. I do indeed literally go through hundreds of images at about 1 per second. Some are much quicker, and some may take a bit. It's about the same speed if most are rejects as it is if most are keepers.
The hard ones are those "best of a multiple series". Gads, I shot about twenty images of this wonderful 80 year old lady the other day, and it was nothing but tedious trying to decide amongst them. The reward was that she flat said it was the best portrait of her that had ever been taken.
The program is immaterial. I can do that in Bridge or in FastStone. The *program* doesn't tell you which image is the one you want to process in post. The program simply allows you to move from image to image and display it full screen.Trust me, the program is not immaterial. As I noted the one I use has been highly customized. After several years of using it I put in some really tedious days of work to make it do things in ways that suited my needs. I can, for example, copy each selected image to a common directory, which is handy when I want to sort through a few thousands of archived images and pull out ones that fit some criteria. When sorting images just copied from the camera, there is the option to skip to the next, to put in into a "rejected" directory, or to move it to one of several possible subdirectories. Now, this doesn't show all of them at once, and doesn't normally show thumbnails, and no matter what the image size they all show up, one at a time, the same size on the screen. A separate window pops up with the list and with the command buttons (none are icons, they all have text labels). Moving up or down the list for a full sized display can be done with a keyboard action or with a mouse click. The same for 10% size changes or 2x or x/2 size changes. Cropping out a selection to view uses the mouse. Typically I sort images with one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse. Touching the space bar goes to the next image, and clicking the mouse put it into the selected subdirectory.
None of this is all crowded into one window. So if this is being done in conjunction with something like typesetting or email, I can locate the display window and/or the command window anywhere, as is also true of the text editor window.
I had used this program for several years before I customized it, and everything was specifically done to speed up my work. And you can rest assured that it had that effect.
I literally dread the idea of ever having to change to some other previewing program, just because this one is so well adapted to my specific needs.
If it's an event, while each image may be a different view of - say - a crowd scene - the one-second claim only says you're picking the possible hits from the sure misses.Don't read into it something that isn't there! I did not say that I do every image at 1 per second. I said that 1000 images can be done in 15 to 20 minutes. Many of them might be two per second. But sometimes I might have to take 5 minutes to decide which one out of 20.
Of course there are tricks to make it faster too. The first time through might be relatively a coarse selections. Dump everything that is technically unuseable. Put everything that is even close to the right thing for a given subject into one subdirectory. Pick out the eye poppers that definitely have the basic ingrediants to be special.
Then go back and look only at what is in each catagory and make critical evaluations. These take much less time, at least for me, than if critical analysis was done the first time I saw them without seeing what else is there and without looking just at the few that are similar.
I would surely hope that you're spending more than one second on the "possible hits".You have to read what I said...
If I'm shooting a crowd scene, I'm going to spend much more than a second on even the ones that look like sure misses. Sometimes what misses as the primary scene is a winner if cropped to something not noticed when framing the images.That would have been the major speed bump for me 20 years ago. Today I'm pretty clear about composition and content that will produce what I want. Of course time goes on and we all change... so one of the fun things in life is to go back through archives and find images that I didn't spot when it was taken.
I make a lot of commercial use of my archives, so when someone needs a shot of a Snowy Owl I don't go out and find an owl to shoot, I spend some very pleasant time looking at what I've got with the proposed use in mind. An example would be that a few years back the need was for about 20 small images of owls, each different. That was fascinating because many images that simply were not useful for even 8x10 prints are just wonderful for a 3x4. They made the choices from about 50 that I picked, and half of those had been skipped over as useless in previous viewings.
-- Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/ Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com
2013-11-30-
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