Image Organization & Selection

Once you have taken some amazing photos you need to organize your images and selecting the ones you will process. This activity used to be called Editing but these days that term can often refer to the post processing step as well. I believe editing is a skill and is as important as the other two parts. It is a skill you can learn but it does take practice but I hope this section will help you learn a little more about about editing.

The Technical Stuff

Have a system for downloading images from your camera

Make a little ritual for taking photos off your camera at the end of a photoshoot. Make sure you empty your cards, put them in the catalogue where you will find them, clear the card and put it back in your camera bag. This will mean you don’t loose an image because you forgot to download it before going on another shoot.

What do you do if you accidentally format your card before you have downloaded them? When you format a memory card the computer doesn’t really remove the photos from the card. Instead the computer just removes the table of contents on the card so the computer thinks the card is empty. There are great tools for recovering photos from your memory cards like CardRecovery (about AU$65 in March 2022) which will check the information stored on the card and locate any delete images. It can’t recover images if a new photo is recorded over the top of a delete image so it works best when the card has been freshly formatted.

Organize your photo catalogue

You need a system for organizing and managing your photo catalogue. It almost doesn’t matter what that system is as long as it is logical to you, repeatable and you can find the images you are looking for. I suggest you keep a separate folder for each photo project and keep them in grouped by theme rather than date. You can try arranging the photos by:

the location>date/event
the style of photography (macro, landscape, portrait)>location/subject
the date>subject
etc..

Image Storage

Computers are getting faster all the time but the hard drives are not getting much bigger so I recommend you store your images on a portable hard drive rather than on your computer itself. Small, portable hard drives with 4 terabytes of storage, like this one, can be purchased for around $120. Buy two and store a copy of your photos on each hard drive.

Also, consider purchasing a cloud storage or could back up service for your photos. I store my final images on Dropbox, but you can subscribe to a service like Backblaze which will automatically upload your computer’s hard drive and any external drives attached to your computer. This will save your photos if you loose all of your hardware.

Invest in a good computer screen and calibrator

Your computer needs to have a good screen because it is how you will interface with your images. When you buy a laptop your going to be using the built in screen most of the time so pay attention to this when buying it. Try to get an IPS screen for their better viewing angles and better colour. I always go to the Wirecutter Website to see what they say is the best screen right now. They review a lot of hardware and I bought a Dell UltraSharp U2415 6 or so years ago after they suggested it and it has been a faithful workhorse until it died all of a sudden. However I managed to find a second hand one on ebay for less than $100 and it’s working really well so far.

Also its best to have a colour calibrator for your screen to make sure what you are seeing is as accurate as possible. For digital competitions this is very important because the judge will most likely have a nice, calibrated screen for looking at your images. You’ll want them to see the photo the way you see it. This will also help you with printing your images too.

Software

You’ll find it difficult to find someone who is not using either Lightroom or Photoshop for their photography these days and it’s for good reason. For 30 years Adobe has been making image editing software and it’s shaped the way we make photos. You can have both programs for A$14.29 a month which is not much different to Netflix so it’s cheaper than it has ever been to have the industry standard photo processing software at home (it used to thousands of dollars to buy). There are heaps of tutorials and guides for using these programs so it’s also easier now then it used to be to learn how to use them.

Learn to cull photos

Choosing which photos to work on is a skill in itself and it is something that you will get better at over time. Be brutal and honest with yourself when you are going through the images you have taken. Remember the things we talked about it part 1, take out photos that are not in focus, that have blown out highlights, where the lighting is too harsh. When you get down to a couple of similar photos I suggest you put all the images up on the screen at the same time and remove the least impactful image in the group, and then the next one and so on until you have one left. Survey view in the Library Module in Lightroom Classic is really good for doing this.

Here you can click on the “X” in the bottom right corner of each photo and it will be deselected. Then you can keep eliminating images until there is only one left.

Now you have the photos lets look at getting them ready for competition.

Guides

Preparing Photos for Competition Part Two