Archive for January 7, 2008

Monday, January 7, 2008

Photo Editing Workflow

Fraser Speirs describes how he uses Aperture:

The first thing I’ll do is go through each stack and choose the pick for that stack. This is nothing at all to do with whether any of the images in the stack are any good. My aim in this pass through my shoot is to be able to close all the stacks, be certain that the pick of the stack is the best one in there and basically never open them again.

Also:

My rule is basically “don’t delete” unless I’d be keeping around a ton of rejects alongside two or three good shots in a project. Recall that my criteria for marking a photo as a reject is that there’s something photographically wrong with it, so I’m not usually marking a huge number of shots as reject. What I usually end up with is a lot of poorly-composed One Star shots. I keep all of those because they’re good to learn from—particularly if I’m making a repeat visit somewhere.

Update: Projects and Folders:

I find this Year/Month arrangement to be pretty useful. I find it much easier to remember things by date than by ‘theme’. Theme-based organisation is too fuzzy: I doubt I would be as consistent in my organisation, and I would be constantly wondering about whether I should reorganise. In any case, keywords and smart albums are a better way to overlay theme-based organistion on top of date-based organisation.