EclecticGuy

In this Part C I will talk about what to do with all of those photographs you took out on the soccer pitch! I use a particular workflow and set of tools because they work for me, but many of the concepts can be applied to the tools you have. Remember though, I am an amateur and I do this for fun. I share my photos with the other families on the team. Depending on what your goals are, my workflow may not be the best for you.

Since 1986 I have purchased and used almost every major photo processing and cataloging product for the Macintosh – in fact, I even started a company in 2002 (Pixingo) to build a post-production workflow application (PhotoFirst) targeted at professional photographers. That’s the PhotoFirst application icon that I designed and here is a screenshot of the Compare Task pane:

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Hopefully, you can learn from my experience and save some money (and aggravation) to boot!

Part C – Post-production Techniques

When I return from shooting, my objective is to get the best photographs processed and published on my photo Web site quickly – but with high quality. A 16GB Compact Flash card containing 1200 RAW (11-13MB) images from one or more soccer games presents a serious challenge! If I spent 10 seconds on each photo, it would take 3 hrs. 20 mins. to process each day’s photos – and that is if I only spent 10 seconds per photo! Most photographers spend much more time than that. Consider what steps must be performed on each “keeper” photo (not in any specific order):

• color manage
• straighten to remove tilt
• crop
• correct exposure
• correct white balance
• spot corrections
• correct contrast
• remove noise
• tag
• resize & format

One approach to weed out the culls is to quickly review each photo and either flag the bad photos or the “good” photos. Then, you perform the production steps on the good photos in a second pass. This approach works well – especially if you use different software for organizing/cataloging and photo corrections. For instance, if you use Microsoft’s Expression or Apple’s iPhoto to organize your photos and Adobe Photoshop to perform straightening, cropping, tonal and color corrections, etc. I used Expression Media (actually it was called iView Multimedia before Microsoft acquired the company) and Photoshop for many years in this way.

An alternative approach, and the one that I use now that tools like Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture are available, is to take one pass through the photos and complete all the operations on each photo as I go. For most of my soccer shoots, I can process the entire set of images using only Adobe Lightroom. Days with difficult lighting (like the rain storm I shot in last Saturday) may require some additional image processing in Photoshop or Noise Ninja.

Before I get in to the details on organizing your photos, I do want to say a few words about back-ups. Digital photos are precious – if your disk crashes or you “accidently” delete them, they can be lost forever. Big RAW photos consume lots of disk storage so many photographers have a tendency not to back them up. If your photos are important to you, then back them up. You don’t have to go the the lengths I do, a simple extra hard disk or occasional backups to high quality DVDs should suffice. Now let me describe how I organize my soccer photos, since organization seems to cause a lot of consternation.

I use 2 external 1TB (each) hard disks that I keep duplicate copies of my photos on. One of these disks is my master library (the one that has the Lightroom catalog on it) and the other is my backup library. The master library is also automatically backed up to my Apple TimeCapsule. That gives me a total of 3 copies of each photo on 3 different disks. If a disk starts to go bad (which seems to happen every 4 or 5 years), I purchase 2 of the “latest and greatest” disks and copy the master and backup catalogs to these new disks. I’ve done that a few times over the years.

On my master disk I have a folder named Lightroom and below that are folders for my photo collection (like Landscapes, Family, Cars, etc). Since I am discussing soccer photographs in this post, I’ll focus on that. Under Lightroom is a Soccer folder and below that are folders organized by year (I call the “year” folder) – for instance 2006, 2007 and 2008. I like a chronological organization for soccer games since it makes it easy to find a game when a parent asks, “Do you still have that photo of Billy from the Sachems game last October?”

When I return from a game, I create a new folder under the year folder and name it for the current day (I call the “day” folder) like this: 2008-09-12. So, for example, my disk(s) would be organized like this for today’s (September 12th, 2008) photos:

Lightroom/Soccer/2008/2008-09-12

Inside the day folder, I create a folder for each game I shot (I call the “game” folder). These I name after the teams that played – so something like Stars U12 vs Bolts. I have 2 boys on Stars (U12 and U14) so I organize by my sons’ team names first. For example, if I shot 2 games today – one for each son – I would create 2 game folders. Once these folders are created on the master disk, I insert my Compact Flash card in to the card reader and copy the photos to the appropriate game folders. In practice, I use Mac OSX Automator scripts to create the folders and copy the files to the master disk. I do not delete the photos from the CF card yet, I like to do that after I have all the photos processed, the processed photos copied to my backup hard disk, and the finals uploaded to my Web site. 

Now that my photos are organized on my master hard disk, I launch Lightroom and import the photos using Lightroom’s Synchronize Folders… function on the current year folder. Here’s what I mean:

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This adds the photos to Lightroom’s catalog and the new day and game folders show up in the list. With the photos now organized, I am ready to start the workflow! What I am about to describe may seem a little odd but there is a method to my madness. It is what works for me.

To get started, I select one of the game folders that has photos to process and select Lightroom’s Develop tool. I zoom the window to occupy the full screen, make sure my workspace lighting is satisfactory, get a drink, and start to process.

As I look at each photo I make a determination if it is an obvious cull for one of these reasons:

• out of focus
• nothing in frame (usually a foot shot!)
• ball not visible anywhere in frame
• really bad composition – none of my team’s players,  jumbled group of players, PortaPotty in background, etc

I set the photo’s color label to “Red” (just press the 6 key). This is how I safely mark cull photos for later deleting. I don’t like to delete as I go – that’s a dangerous practice and is disrupts my rhythm waiting for the deletion to finish. I used to use Lightroom’s “Rejected” feature (X key) but I like the color coding scheme I use now better.

Many times I’ll have a sequence of photos of a player dribbling the ball, passing, etc. I usually only post one of these to my Web site but I like to keep the others if they are good shots. I mark those with the “Blue” color label (9 key). If the photo is a keeper, I set its flag to “Flagged” (P key).

So, to recap, for each photo I look at I either set its color to “Red” or “Blue” or flag to “Flagged”. Occasionally I might have to scroll forward a few photos to see a series of a play developing in order to choose the best to flag. The others usually get set to “Blue” unless they have an obvious defect and are set to “Red”. I’ll explain how I use these color tagged photos later.

Once I have a “Flagged” photo, I start my post-production sequence. The first thing I do is use the Crop & Straighten tool (red arrow).

I like to make sure my horizons are level and any goal posts, fence posts, buildings, flag poles, etc are actually plumb! Its a small step but it is amazing how many amateur photographers neglect this step. Once the photo is straightened, I crop. Cropping is an artistic decision. I personally like tight crops for my players. But I do mix it up with some wide group crops if the composition is interesting. Here are examples of each.

Since I almost always shoot in Manual mode (see Part B of this series), once I have corrected the first photo from the game, I can Copy and re-apply those settings to most of the others. To make tonal and color corrections, I use Lightroom’s Basic panel:

Usually, I only need to use this tool to enhance the photo. I generally start with Exposure and then set the White Balance using the Eye Dropper tool on a neutral part of the image like a white goalpost, jersey or lettering, or white ball in the frame. Occasionally, I will tweak the Temp and Tint to get a more pleasing white balance. Sometimes a slight tweak to Fill Light can bring out an underexposed face.

With the basic exposure and white balance set, I move on to Brightness and Contrast. Most of the time, these are just left at their defaults but sometimes can help make a photo pop. I use the Lightroom Preset named General-Punch which bumps the Clarity and Vibrance a bit. I really like using Lightroom’s Vibrance tool instead of Saturation – saturation affects all of the tones in your photo whereas vibrance only affects the primary colors but not the player’s face and skin. Try an experiment and you’ll see what I mean.

Finally, I apply the Sharpen-Portraits Preset. Rarely, I’ll tweak the sharpening on the Detail panel.

Probably 80% of my photos can be processed as just described. Once I’ve completed the first photo, I do a Shift-Command-C (copy) to copy the settings to apply to successive photos. I make sure to uncheck the Chromatic Aberration, Split Toning, Local Adjustments, Calibration, Spot Removal, and Crop checkboxes. 

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Once the first photo is completed, the rest usually go very quickly. The workflow looks like the following – the amount of time each step takes is in ‘( )’:

1. (1 second) Determine what to do with the photo – set its color label to “Red” or “Blue” or flag to “Flagged”
2. (4 seconds) Use the Crop & Straighten tool
3. (1 second) Paste the Settings (Shift-Command-V)
4. (0 to 10 seconds) Make any minor enhancements unique to this photo

Most of the time I only spend 1 second per photo. That cuts that 3 hr. 20 min. down to 20 minutes! Of course, I spend a few extra seconds on the keepers (anywhere from 5 additional seconds to 15 or more), but that will be on a select few of the 1200 original photos.

Sometimes, things are not quite so easy because of tough lighting conditions, etc. In those cases, more work on individual photos might be necessary. The Tone Curve and Color panels are great tools to use in these cases. On really poor lighting days where I’ve had to bump the ISO from 800 up to 1600, I’ll use Noise Ninja to cleanup the noise immediately after straightening and cropping but before other corrections.

After I’ve taken the pass through all of the photos, I am ready for clean up and publishing. First I review all of the “Red” labeled photos by choosing the “Red” filter button. If I have a good set of keepers, I’ll usually just select all of these “Red” photos and delete them from the disk. Gone, forever. But they were the dregs of the shoot. Remember, I have all of those “Blue” labeled photos that weren’t quite suitable for publishing but worth hanging on to. If I am really satisfied with the keepers, I’ll go through the “Blue” images and delete some of the extras just to cut down on disk storage space.

Now I set the “Flagged” filter to view only the keeper photos. I select all of them and choose the File->Export… menu item. I use the Zenfolio photo site and use Jeffrey Friedl’s excellent Lightroom Zenfolio Export plug-in that automatically publishes my photos to the site. Make sure to set the color profile to sRGB for photos you are publishing to the Web. The plug-in can also save a set of photos to the local disk. I use this option to keep a set of final, enhanced photos on my local disk. I organize these in a folder named Zenfolio exactly like I organize the photos in the Lightroom folder. This folder is also backed up to my TimeCapsule – giving me 2 additional “backups” (one on Zenfolio, one on the TimeCapsule). Finally, I copy the entire day folder tree from the master disk to the backup disk and then and only then do I delete the photos on my Compact Flash card!

I hope this gives you a sense of my workflow. Like I said earlier, don’t accept this as the only way to handle your photos. But I think the general process is worth considering: 1) cull down to the best photos as quickly as possible, 2) straighten and crop the best ones, 3) enhance the best ones and try to reuse your adjustments, 4) BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS!