Are you overwhelmed by the sheer number of photos that you capture on each shoot? Sorting through hundreds, or even thousands, of images to find your best shots can be a daunting task. Thankfully, Adobe Lightroom Classic offers powerful tools for clever users who want to streamline the culling process. In this video tutorial, we’ll delve into the efficient multi-pass sorting workflow that I use to quickly identify and select my best images.
Key Concepts
- Collections and Smart Collections- These are essential features in Lightroom Classic for organizing and filtering your photos.
- Pick and Reject Flags- Lightroom’s flagging system allows you to quickly mark images as keepers or rejects. Remember, the keyboard shortcut for the Pick flag is (P), (X) is for the Reject flag, and (U) resets an image to the unflagged, or neutral, status.
The Multi-Pass Sorting Workflow
- Import and Organize- Import your new photos into Lightroom Classic and then add them to a dedicated drag-and-drop collection.
- First Pass: Find Obvious Rejects- Quickly identify and mark all of the clearly unsuitable images (e.g., blurry, out of focus, poorly composed) with the Reject flag.
- Second Pass: Cull Out The Mediocre- Review all of the remaining images and eliminate any that don’t meet your quality standards. Additionally, mark the most appealing photos with the Pick flag.
- Third Pass: Selecting The Winners- Carefully evaluate all of the Picked images, using Classic’s Loupe, Survey, and Compare View Modes to identify the best shots based on composition, lighting, and focus. When you find your very best images, assign them a one-star rating.
- Review, Refine, and Delete: If necessary, revisit the previous passes to ensure you haven’t missed any gems. A bonus tip: Use the keyboard shortcut Shift + Alt / Option + Cmd + Delete on a Mac (or Shift + Alt + Ctrl + Delete on Windows) to quickly delete the rejected images once you are convinced that these photos will never be needed.
Efficient Sorting Requires Building the Right Smart Collections
Setting up the series of Smart Collections that I demonstrate in this video takes a little time. This is not hard work but efficiency demands more than Lightroom Classic’s default settings. The good news is that once you have created these tools then you can use them again and again for every new photo shoot.
By following this multi-pass sorting workflow, and utilizing all of Lightroom Classic’s powerful features, you can significantly reduce the amount of time that you spend culling through lousy images and focus more of your time on your very best photographs!
