Selecting, Rating and Tagging Images

The first step of the post-processing workflow is to select the images you wish to keep, and to tag those that require further processing. This allows you to discard any outtakes or mishaps that take up valuable space on your workstation’s hard disk. You perform this task using Adobe Bridge, or the library viewer of other applications such as Aperture or Lightroom.

First, create a folder on your workstation or in your applications’s library to contain all the images offloaded from cameras and/or flash memory cards. Mine is named “Contact Sheet”, and contains subfolders for each of my cameras, even my film bodies which hold 35mm film scans.

As you add images to these folders, you review them from time to time and eliminate any completely wrong exposures, such as those first few images shot on the settings used from the previous session. Don’t actually delete them but “reject” them (tag them as “rejected”) if your application allows. This hides them from view, but allows them to remain in the folder. This way, if you to select and import all the images from the SD card (or other flash memory), to this folder, the application will “see” any duplicates and give you the opportunity to skip them. This ensures that you don’t leave any images behind. Once the card is reformatted, you can then delete the rejects.

Now comes the time to review the images. Rate any obvious keepers with five stars, workable images with three, and dogs with one, basing these decisions mostly on composition. Is the scale adequate? Are background elements interfering with the readability of the subject? Is it reasonably in focus?

Then, revisit these images and look at fine details such as focus and shadow/highlight detail. If two images are rated three, but on closer inspection one of them is sharper, upgrade it to a four. Of those fives, there may be some softer ones, so downgrade those to a four. The ones may be technically inferior, but they may have artistic potential, so uprate them accordingly. The background may be completely blown out, and the foreground way too dark, but this might make for an expressive silhouette.

Once you arrive at a final set of images, you can then tag them further with “keywords”, which will allow you to find them more easily in the future. You can now also tag them for further post-processing.

When the time comes to archive the images, this tagging process will enable you to quickly select and move them to their respective archive folders for burning onto optical media. The images tagged for further processing can then be moved to a separate folder until they are complete. Mine is named, “Lightbox”.

Dust and scratch removal often take a long time, distributed over several “sessions”. The working images (in “lossless” TIFF format so that subsequent savings don’t degrade image quality) remain in the Lightbox folder until they are complete, when they are saved as final JPEG copies. Aperture, Camera Raw, and Lightroom allow you to clone out spots in JPEG files using non-destructive algorithms, so you can leave them in this format to save space if you wish. Once complete you make a single duplicate JPEG copy with the changes in place, minimizing any image degradation.