Lightroom – Page 8 – Just thoughts

This is a subject I return to quite regularly, the last time being May, 2014. It’s an important subject because with digital photography you create many, many images, and if you’re not organised you’ll lose some images you want to keep or use, which can lead to unnecessary frustration and a lot of wasted time.

In the earlier post I detailed how I was using an external hard drive (a WD My Passport Slim) to store all Images and my main Lightroom Catalog. Nothing has changed here – the ability to swap between the MacBook Pro and the iMac for editing working off a single catalog and image store has been invaluable – the only modifications being:

I always do a second copy of my imported images to a Folder on the Hard Disk of the Mac the external Hard Disk is attached to – on both systems this is Pictures > Lightroom Backup > Imports, and
I always backup the Catalog on exit every time to Pictures > Lightroom Backup > Catalogs.

When I’m confident the external hard drive has been backed-up to Time Machine when it’s connected to the iMac, I delete the contents of the Lightroom Backup folder(s) on both systems.

I’ve also decided that I need some “off-site” backup as well, so periodically I ask for a disk, lodged with a neighbour, to be returned so that I can do a complete disk copy of the external hard disk.

I did consider using a cloud drive for the second copies, and the catalog backups, but with the size of the image files now being so large (a single RAW image from the A7r is over 30Mb) there was too much delay being introduced in sync’ing files to the Cloud. So, regretably I decided against that option.

However, an alternative could be to use a Wireless External Hard Drive such as the WD My Passport Wireless with it’s integral SD slot and use another connected Hard Disk to store the Second Copies / Catalog Backups to. I’m considering this option as I hinted in my post yesterday.

[It’s at this stage of the process that I would have liked to have considered using Lightroom Mobile to do the tagging and creation of collections, but my iPad is not up to the task, and the initial release of software didn’t allow me to do the tagging I wanted to do – this may have changed in later releases, I haven’t checked.]

So that’s the hardware part of the workflow sorted, what about the software? Well … Lightroom is very easily configured using Presets to store the images where you want them, to add keywords as you import the images and do certain adjustments (eg for lens, for camera, etc.). It really is important to tag (keyword), and label your images as you import them, so the next stage for me is absolutely vital.

I review every image in the Lightroom Library module and if I’m going to keep it because it has no flaw, I then rate it on a star basis by just typing 1, 2 , 3, 4 or 5, and I add any additional keywords to individual images. That done, I then create a Smart Collection of all the images rated at 3 to 5. This is the collection I then start reviewing in the Develop module.

[An aside mainly for non-Lightroom users. It is important to remember (in Lightroom) that all my non-deleted images are stored in folders (mine are by date) on the drive and that Collections are virtual “pointers” to the originals. Lightroom is a non-destructive photo-editing program. All changes to images are recorded in the Catalog, so you can always go back to any step of the process and move forward from there again – sometimes after creating a virtual copy of the image to store the state of the image before anymore changes are made.]

If, when editing, I consider the rating of the image should be changed, I do just that, which will cause an image to fall out of the Smart Collection. My objective here is to get a set of images rated 4, or 5 that I am going to do further work on. If there are a considerable number of images, I might set up another Smart Collection to reflect this.

Working on this collection I will then colour code the images red (6) – no further work will be done on the image, yellow (7) – work still to be done on the image, or green (8) – finished image, to indicate where the image has got in the post-processing.

This workflow and image categorisation has served me well in identifying images to be uploaded to Blurb for Photobooks, or for images that might be printed.

That’s where I am this May, I wonder what I’ll be doing next May :-).

A sequence of anxious emails from my daughter following her discovery that many video clips appeared to be missing following a migration from a PC to a Mac platform caused me to investigate what had gone wrong, and whether there really was a problem … or not? This is what appears to have happened.

All the video clips HAD been copied over, but only the ones whose format was acceptable to iPhoto were viewable in that library. This only came to light when she noticed they were missing from Lightroom after an import from iPhoto – a process described here. Of course iMovie can only read MPEG-4 (MOV) files so they didn’t appear there either!

This raised the issue in my mind of what should you do with video clips to preserve them. An easy solution would be to post them all to YouTube or Vimeo, I suppose – but that seems to be a bit OTT for a clip 15secs, or so, long, and yet that 15secs might represent a really valuable memory that you wouldn’t want to lose. So … what workflow should you adopt for video clips? What practices should you adopt to ensure your snatched clips are retained for posterity?

The first thing that occurred to me, was that it’s very important to distinguish between cataloguing and editing your video clips. Yes … I know that’s obvious but it needs to be re-stated as the workflow that you adopt depends upon the decisions you make on storage and cataloguing. I love Lightroom because (like Picasa) it catalogues your media wherever it’s located in your file system. It doesn’t need to bring all the media together into a single place as iPhoto, Photoshop and others do, and which then lose the individual files inside a catalogue (or database). This approach enables you in Lightroom to have different catalogues looking at different slices of your media collection without creating copies (and taking up disk space). However, if you don’t use Lightroom … I would recommend following the following three golden rules:

1) Keep your video clips in a different folder on your hard disk from your photographs, or images;
2) Convert the clips to MPEG-4 as soon as you’ve imported them, if they aren’t already in that format;
3) After editing (in Movie Maker, or iMovie) always ensure you save, or export the finished movie as MPEG-4.

These three simple rules should ensure that you won’t be left with clips that you can’t read, view or edit as technology moves on.

So if you’re a Lightroom user the import into the Lightroom catalogue is a good decision, especially since it supports a wide range of video formats. [NB It doesn’t support WMV files however, so you’ll need to do a conversion of files if you’re moving from Windows to Mac and want to import files from that format, and its worthwhile doing the conversion for all other formats at the same time into MPEG-4. For this, I recommend Handbrake – but more about that later.]

However, you what you can edit in Lightroom is limited, therefore you need some way of accessing these clips so that you can edit them in, for instance, iMovie, or Windows Movie Maker. I would suggest that means you need a well-organised file-store and also a way of clearly identifying video clips inside your Lightroom catalogue. Luckily, you can do this very easily by creating a Smart Collection in Lightroom which identifies files with given suffixes. You should then export these to a temporary folder to allow format conversion (eg AVI to MPEG-4), and then import into an editing programme. [NB You can only rely on iMovie supporting Apple’s flavour of the MOV format, eg from the iPhone/iPad, so conversion of anything else to MPEG-4 first is a sensible precursor to the import.]

So how do you do a conversion to MPEG-4 or MP4? I use, and recommend using Handbrake – as mentioned above. Although the dashboard you’re presented with looks a bit daunting, the defaults are designed to produced high-quality MP4 formatted files. It appears at first that you can only select one file at a time to convert, but that is not the case since if you navigate using the Source button to the folder where your video clips are (that’s why I mentioned exporting the files to a temporary folder above if the files werre already in Lightroom), you can then select “Add All Titles to to Queue …” from the File tab. The re-formatted files can then be imported back into Lightroom and the originals deleted – again using Smart Collections.

This post has focussed on the Mac and using iMovie, but if you’re a PC user I would recommend using Windows Movie Maker which is a very effective and easy to learn package and which you can use alongside Lightroom as I’ve described above. If you aren’t a Lightroom user then follow the golden rules above. Above all … don’t leave any video clips in any format other than MPEG-4 if you want to be sure of retaining compatibility for the future.

Tag: Lightroom

Workflow, workflow every photographer needs a workflow

What do you do with video clips?