Looking for ways to speed up my editing workflow

Software darktable
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I’ve just put aside an X-Touch mini at my local DJ store and hope to pick it up this evening.
What made it a no-brainer for me was that:

  1. I’ve been given some money and told to choose myself a gift (always a nice thing - thanks, Mum!)
  2. I don’t have to wait until January for delivery via Amazon.
  3. It is also touted as a controller for X-Plane, which I have been enjoying of late. For those of you who enjoy gaming, X-Plane 12 is on sale on Steam at the moment, at least here in Australia.

Since I use Sigmoid as my go-to tone-mapper in darktable, I’ll be using the rotary encoders for Exposure and sigmoid primarily.

As for reducing the workload, I have discovered that days with many, many captures are best left for quite some time before the big cull. A few recent examples:

  1. I took several hundred exposures on a trip to Cairns (in Far North Queensland) in May - at a sanctuary containing exotic birds, and another with butterflies. Although some of the best I processed within a week or two, it is only this past weekend that I culled out the vast majority of the remainder. Especially with locations or subjects that are hard to revisit, it feels very final to delete hundreds of RAWS.
  2. Similarly, I went totally snap-happy using multiple memory cards and batteries on a whale-watching tour in July. The best 12 or so captures I processed within a few days, but culling the rest has not yet happened.
  3. I visited New Zealand in September and made a point of touring the Hobbiton Movie Set near Matamata. I had been there previously in 2015, but without a decent camera. Because it is a subject hard and expensive to revisit, I have only culled out the obvious rejects, and have processed some 40 or so favourites. A few hundred other raws are destined to be overwritten, but they have yet to be so explicitly designated.

My experience is that a month or three need to have passed before the degree of personal investment I feel in the captures has dissipated enough for me to make more objective, dispassionate decisions about what to keep and polish (diamonds, not turds, hopefully!) and what to consign to the void.

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