Hello,
I would like to get some feed back from RT users, how you people doing initial culling of RAW images, say we have a folder containing quite a large number of raw images say 1000 images of an event, how do we go about initial culling.
say we need to move keepers and rejects into two separate folders after a preview.
This was a question raised by one of the attendees in a class on RT, which I recently did.
One important issue came about is : culling, looking at the jpg preview either extracted from the raw (on camera processed) or some other uncontrolled default process of raw is justifiable ?
Please give some of your thoughts and opinions on this issue.
hi, as somebody already said in another similar thread, I like geeqie for that (and for many other things).
I use geeqie to open images in RT/Dark table and assign a color label or red.
I find RawTherapee too slow for that. Geeqie, Digikam or darktable do better job.
How about a program that doesn’t require one to compile the software?
My process is pretty straightforward. If I’m culling shots from a shoot I find that they are normally grouped logically by pose/type. So there’s usually a handful of each type/pose.
I will open up one of them and scroll through a filmstrip view. As I find ones that I think are good I’ll assign them a star. I’ll usually go pretty quickly through them on this first pass.
I’ll then use the filters to only view the ones that I’ve starred at some level, and start comparing similar star levels to choose ones I think are worth pursuing. Usually by increasing star levels until I end up at just a few that are rated highly enough to start editing more seriously.
At this stage it’s mostly about the shot being composed and framed well, and to at least look sharp to me. As they get higher stars I’ll check for focus and that the exposure isn’t completely blown.
Due to this, looking at the JPG or default generated raw doesn’t really make a huge difference.
I don’t really worry about sorting these into folders at this point. As I get ones that I want to edit further I may export them to a sub-folder.
As far as I’m concerned, culling is something that occurs before an image ever reaches RT or any other editing program. It’s getting rid of the absolute crap images, like the “oops, I was sure I took off the lens cap” images and the out of focus ones. As several others have said here and elsewhere, Geeqie is a nice lightweight app for culling. It’s quick, and automatically groups raw and jpg images so you can delete the crap in one motion. And if an image survives the cull, it’s not getting deleted…storage is pretty cheap these days.