This article is brought to you by Narrative - an image selection and blogging software for photographers. Today, they are sharing 5 useful tips to help optimize your culling process and significantly reduce the time you spend selecting the best images from your photography sessions. We’ve also linked an incredible GIVEAWAY at the bottom of this post, that can help you win a 1 year subscription for Narrative Publish Pro, 1 year of Select Pro and 1 Squaremuse design kit of your choice. Scroll for details and enjoy this insightful read!
5 ways to speed up your culling workflow
Let’s agree - culling is tedious. We know it’s a task that needs to be done, but we want it done as fast as possible. Here are a few ways you can optimize this part of your workflow so you can spend less time culling and more time doing what you love, shooting!
1. Use a SSD
Culling images that are on a hard drive can slow down your post-production process significantly. SSDs are about twice as fast as HHDs and that makes them a great option for using as your working storage AKA for storing files you are still using or working on. Purchasing an SSD is definitely worth the investment.
2. Use fast software with AI
The most important part of a fast culling workflow is using fast software. What’s even better? Software that automates part of the culling process for you!
Narrative Select is a lightning-fast photo culling software built for professional photographers. The software uses AI to automatically detect and warn you if a subject’s face is out of focus or if they are blinking and zooming into faces is as easy as tapping the space bar.
If you are culling group shots, Select has an incredible time saving feature called the close-ups panel. This shows you close-up crops of every face in a photo so you can quickly check every person in an image is looking good - no need to zoom!
Their latest feature detects scenes, this means when you import a new project Select uses AI to organize your images into sets of similar images making it easy for you to skip to the next scene once you have chosen the best image.
AI powered Images Assessments will pick out the worst images in each scene for you and apply warnings to those images. That way you can choose to hide all of the images with warning labels on them, meaning Select is basically doing your culling for you. Seeing less images = A huge time saver when culling!
Fitting Select into your workflow is super easy as it automatically connects up with Lightroom so when you finish culling your images you simply click one button ‘Ship’ and they will open in Lightroom and you can add it to a catalogue or create a new one.
Are you excited to try Narrative Select? They have an exclusive offer for all our readers! Get 15% off Narrative Select Pro version. Just use code SQUAREMUSE15 at checkout.
3. Keep it simple
Photographers can have a meticulously organized culling workflow, which can be great in theory, but what ends up happening is you spend too much time analysing each image. You start to stop and ask yourself questions on each image,“is this good enough for my blog?” Each extra second you spend on an image adds up to a lot over time.
When you go through your photos, only apply one rating, these will be the ones you want to edit. Don’t second guess, just apply a rating. After you have done this, you should have reduced your number of images significantly. You can then go through the images one final time, adding a second rating to the ones you are going to edit. It’s here where you will be able to quickly identify any similar images.
4. Always cull in
There are two types of culling methods: “culling in” and “culling out.” Culling out is when you are rejecting the images you don’t want, whereas culling in is adding a rating to the images you want to keep. The reason culling in saves you so much time is you will be choosing significantly less images than you would be rejecting.
5. Cull Backwards
Your winning shots will often be at the end of the scene. Why? At the start of a scene, you may move the couple or subject based on the light, get them to change their pose etc, and you will keep going until you know you got the shot which is generally towards the end!
If you’re culling backwards, you will be looking at the winning shots first, meaning you can jump through the rest of the scene super fast.
Every second you save when culling, amounts to a lot over time! We hope that these tips will help you speed up your culling workflow. Happy culling everyone!
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Here for the Giveaway?
Great! You can enter it via Narrative’s Instagram account by Thursday, June 17th, 2:59 PM PST. All you have to do is follow @narrativeapp and @getsquaremuse on Instagram, and tag 2 friends under this post. Easy peasy.
Good luck, everyone!
Creatively yours,
Squaremuse Team