I’m just wondering what kind of cullling strategies people use with high frame rate shots. For example, I was part of a fashion shoot that went so fast that basically the only thing you could do is point the camera, in my case 15 frames per second and hope for the best in the photographer crowd.
Another one of course it’s birding and sports
Unsharp or pictures with movement are easy but especially in the fashion shoot I I found it difficult to choose between several shots, e.g. which one is ‘the best’. I had sequences of 5-6 shots which could all be rated as 4-5 stars. At the end of the day I filled both my 128 GB cards. That was about 5000 shots.
That being said: I go through my shots and firstly delete technically flawed shots and try to do some early comparative culling.
Then I do 1-2 more rounds of culling where I also start editing because for me to compare some photos they need some crop and love.
What helps most IMHO is temporal distance: the more time passes from the time of capture the clearer I am able to see what I like to keep and what to trash.
Wowie, that’s nearly a year of shooting for me … well, I tend to get about 6k shots a year, but still.
Yeah, maybe try to get at most one shot of each “moment”. Like you don’t really need several pictures of a similar pose. Also I’d say … try to look for unique poses that stand out.
I use my image viewer which has a very fast gallery and allows rating to an XMP sidecar, which is then read by darktable.
First I rate 5* for all decent images in focus, 4* for documentary shots (for iNaturalist). Then I pass through all 5* pics and pick only those with the best focus per burst/set. Then I edit that.
Sometimes I’ll be left with 2-3 very similar pictures, but I rather just copy the edit , adjust crop, and have these for “later”, it never hurts.
Sadly I am already a 20k raws this year Now that I am better at rating/tagging, I can start deleting stuff
I often take about 1000 images per day when travelling which sounds crazy but half of those are JPGs which usually get culled so that brings me down to about 500. But only one third of that 500 are required because I shoot exposure bracketed shots. So maybe about 170 shots are edited and retained.
I use darktable for editing and I do all the culling in the darkroom view. I activate the raw overexposure indicator. In the screen grab shown the brightest bracketed exposure has clipping and I will usually cull that shot and process one of the darker exposures. It is easy then to mark JPGs and the raw files to be deleted in the filmstrip. I find this personally easier than using the lighttable culling options which doesn’t show raw overexposure. In the screenshot you can see five of the six images for this woman have been selected for deletion. Another advantage is that I have a very large view of the subject and if the image is very noisy I can do a snapshot to identify the least noisy image to work with. I can also use snapshots to identify the sharpest image if blur is a problem.
Almost forgot: I setup the view to filter out rejected photos to make them vanish upon rejection. This goes together well with this custom shortcut for reject+next: useful shortcut for culling
Normally I do that yes.but this was one of those fashion shows with a gazillion models (not the top models but okay) with even more types of clothing. Basically, they came up on the catwalk in pairs. Walk down walk back next set. I lost count but I think around 70 sets in total.
I think there were at least 35 photographers pushing for the best spot so composing was almost impossible.
Unfortunately, I cannot share any of the pictured here, but it was a different side of photography to experience, not something I would do more often but a great learning experience
Not that I’m shooting anywhere near that level of shots, but I find this useful as well. Sometimes I do general edits (no crops or masks or retouches that will be specific to an image) and then just copy and paste those edits onto the other images. Sometimes that helps make the “correct” one stand out a bit more.
I average 300-500 shots per outing for about a dozen or so subjects or scenes, so I try to get the count to around 24 photos.
I make a first pass by rating technically acceptable photos with a one star rating - that’s many less keystrokes than rejecting all the bad ones.
Then I’ll go through again and demote any of those one star photos that didn’t turn out that well or had other issues. I might go back and cross compare very close images but it’s not worth it to me most of the time.
Added in 5.0.
Allow for selecting the utility modules to be displayed on the panels in the different views.
Right-click on the empty panel area below the modules to get a menu where they can be hidden or shown. This allows additional modules to be added to the darkroom, like metadata editor and styles.
This replaces the options in the “collections” and “recently used collections” modules’ preferences to show or hide the latter and show a “history” button in the former instead. Users that want the separate module will need to reenable it once via the new Right-click menu.
The menu also contains an option “restore defaults” that resets the selection and position of modules in the current view. In the preferences dialog, on the general tab, there’s a “reset view panels” button that resets all views, including visibility and width of the panels themselves. Added a global preference to swap the left and right side panels in the darkroom view.
The first time a new user presses Tab, they will be warned that this will hide all panels and how to get them back. Hopefully this prevents some confusion or frustration. Drag&drop utility module headers to reposition them across the left and right panels (lighttable) as well as vertically (all views). Each view can have a different layout.
… well, I tend to get about 6k shots a year, but still.
Now that I am better at rating/tagging, I can start deleting stuff
But yeah, as you can tell I don’t shoot much action.
1. Quick Star Rating Scale
(1 star): Default rating assigned upon import. Acceptable photos remain at 1 star (snapshots, no editing required).