Edit early, edit often…!

Wildlife photographer Paul Goldstein thinks I take too many pictures, and he’s probably right. I once took over 38,000 shots of seabirds on a cruise ship one afternoon in Antarctica! Personally, I blame my Sony a1’s high frame rate—I mean, what’s a poor photographer to do…?!

Anyway, the point is that I often have thousands of images to rate, post-process and add metadata to, so it helps to bulk edit those files in Lightroom. There are lots of ways of speeding up your workflow, but I’ll touch on just a few of them that I find especially useful.

Auto Tone

In an ideal world, I’d edit each photo individually and optimise all the settings in the Basic panel. That would mean changing all the settings for White Balance, Tone and Presence and perhaps even choosing a different Treatment or Profile. I’d have to Shift-click the Whites and Blacks to stop the highlights and shadows being clipped, and I’d have to play around with all the other parameters until each image looked perfect.

However, back in the real world, I just don’t have time for all that. I do most of my editing after I get back from a photographic trip, and my priority is to get all the editing done as quickly as possible so that I can send off all my sellable images to Design Pics. That’s my main stock agency, and I always let them have first pick.

There are lots of steps to go through before I can do that, including rating all the images, cropping them, editing them in the Develop Module, adding metadata such as titles and keywords and, finally, exporting them in the correct format.

One of the time-saving measures I use is to select all my images in the Library module and click the Auto button in the Tone Control section of the Quick Develop panel. That will provide a pretty good ‘first draft’ of all the basic Tone and Presence settings, and I can then just quickly look through all the images to see if I need to do any more work.

Masks

The new Select Subject and Select Sky options in Lightroom are incredibly useful, and Adobe has recently updated the software so that these masks will automatically update if you copy and paste them across multiple images. Again, Lightroom won’t always get it absolutely right, and you might have to use the Add or Subtract brush to perfect the automatic selections. However, it’s a great way to save time.

You can obviously use masks for many different purposes, but one tip I picked up from Matt Kloskowski is to brighten the subject and darken the background using masks. Until the recent software update, you’d have had to do that individually for each and every image, but you can now bulk edit as many images as you like. You can either switch on Auto Sync when you create your masks, or you can simply copy and paste your Develop settings (using Shift+Command/Control+C and Shift+Command/Control+V).

I recently edited 100 elephant shots for my weekly upload to microstock agencies. As part of my workflow, I wanted to emphasise the elephants by lifting the shadows in the subjects and darkening the highlights in the backgrounds. I only had to do it once for the first image, and all the others were automatically updated!

Yes, I did have to clean up the selections later, but, with 100 images to edit, that saved me a lot of time. You just have to watch out for a couple of things:

• The selection isn’t perfect for any subject, so be careful not to do too much with each mask. If you soften the background by changing the Texture, Clarity, Sharpness and/or Noise sliders too much, the outline of your subject may soften as well—which you don’t want.

• Applying masks to many different files eats up the processing power of your computer. I recently bought a new Apple MacBook Pro with the best possible specs, but when I do it for 100 images, the CPU usage jumps to around 90%! That makes it hard to make any other changes, so you may have to delete the automatically generated masks first and then re-apply them.

Metadata

Creating the metadata for all my images is one of the most time-consuming tasks. If I want to sell them through stock agencies, there are lots of required fields. Some are generated automatically as part of the EXIF/IPTC data, but I still have to fill out a long list for each individual file:

• File Name

• Title

• Caption

• Headline

• Copy Name

• Keyword Tags

• GPS

• Copyright

• Copyright Status

• City

• State / Province

• Country / Region

• ISO Country Code

Search Replace Transfer Plug-in

Some of these are duplicates for most images, like the File Name, Title, Caption and Headline, but that doesn’t make it easy to change them. For some reason, there’s no built-in way of copying and pasting individual metadata fields in Lightroom, which is a real pain. However, there’s a useful plug-in that will do the job for you.

It’s called Search Replace Transfer by John Beardsworth, and it’s a ‘freemium’ product. That means you can use it for free on 10 files, but you have to make a ‘donation’ of €25 to get unrestricted access. However, it’s well worth it—believe me! The plug-in brings to Lightroom all the power of a word processing program like Microsoft Word. You can copy metadata from one field to another, and the Source and Target fields can be just about anything.

I regularly use it to make sure the File Name, Title, Caption and Headline are the same for files I’m submitting to stock agencies. Different agencies use different EXIF/IPTC fields to populate their databases, so I need to make sure everything is correct before I upload all the files. Otherwise, I’ll either have to edit each one individually or delete the whole upload and start again from scratch!

Spray Can

The other useful trick is to create Keyword Sets and ‘paint’ them over selected files using the spray can tool. This is a great way to save time, but it also helps to make sure all your wildlife images have a consistent set of keywords.

What I do is create different Keyword Sets for the keywords I most frequently use. The vast majority of them are individual species, but I’ve also created sets for Landscape, Portrait, Sunset, Sunrise etc. For the Sets covering a particular animal or bird, I make sure I have the common and Latin name for the species plus any other generic keywords that are relevant. For example, this is my Keyword Set for the cheetah:

• cheetah

• cat

• mammal

• animal

• Acinonyx jubatus

• predator

• feline

• felid

There are only nine spaces in each set, but that’s usually enough for my purposes.

When I name my wildlife images, I always make sure the File Name contains the common name for the species. That means it’s easy to select all the cheetah pictures, say, by filtering on the word ‘cheetah’ in the File Name field.

I can then click the Painter (or ‘spray can’) icon and press Shift to clear the previous keywords and select the new preset. If I click on one of the selected images in the Lightroom Library module, a message will appear to confirm that all the images have been updated. Just make sure you click on the picture itself rather than the grey frame around it—that won’t do anything!

Verdict

These are just a few tools that help me cut down on the time it takes to edit all my images. I hope you find them useful!

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