marcsantacurz
Well-known member
At the moment I am shooting jpeg Fine as I don’t understand RAW sufficiently and don’t have an editing program. My son shoots RAW and reckons, if you’re not careful, you just get mountains of RAW files that you don’t get round to editing/processing.
Raw files are big and can backup your disk, yes!
Personally, I use this method for photos (this applies to my "serious" shots of things, I am much more lenient with personal snapshots with family or friends). I use Lightroom as it has an easy and fast way to reject photos then delete them. Using the built-in Photos app (I'm on mac) is much slower to review a large number of files.
I load them all into Lightroom, and do one pass through them all looking for bad shots (out of focus, boring, obviously wrong) and press the "x" button to reject them. This is a quick pass to get rid of the obviously unusable. Then I select "delete rejected photos" and remove them from disk (they end up in the trash that I then empty). If I am shooting something like the d850 at 45 MP, the raw files are hugh! Often I will load all the JPEG files in this step and do this process on them, then in the last step load the RAW file of the final down-selected images.
Then I do a second pass where for each photo I decide if I want to edit it. This decision is more on the quality of the content, like is it interesting or showing some behavior. For every burst of similar photos, I try to pick only 1 or 2 and get rid of all the other duplicates. At this point, I'm also deciding in 1:1 or 1:3 loupe view if the photo is truly in focus and throwing it out if not. Same method, press "x" then at the end delete all the rejected.
Finally, I'm down to a manageable number of photos (maybe about 20 - 30 out of 300 - 500). Then I edit them (crop, fix lighting, etc.) and during that process I might thrown out another 1/2 of them because they are not really an interesting shot or cannot be salvaged. So, after an afternoon of shooting, I might walk away with 10 - 20 good shots.
Everything else went in the trash and was deleted. After years of doing this, I know that I'm never going to go back to look at a boring photo again.
marc