5 star categories for your photos in Lightroom
A major project for me over the past year has been using Lightroom to make sense of my photo collection. I have added at least one keyword to and geocoded each of my 6,000-odd raw files and, a couple of months ago, I added all of my JPG files from various sources to the catalogue. Since I went digital at the end of 2005, I have accumulated over 11,000 files.
The point of doing all this is to exploit Lightroom’s fundamental advantage over Bridge, the simple organiser that ships with Photoshop: it is built on a database. This means that once you have added as much metadata as you need, can use queries to find photos – and indeed similar photos taken many years apart – based on attributes that mean something to you; for example, ‘find me all my photos of winter sunsets’.
One aspect of tagging I had ignored until recently, however, was star ratings. In his excellent book, Adobe Photoshop CS6 for Photographers, Scott Kelby argued that you only needed to flag your best photos from a shoot and, for summary deletion, your out-of-focus duds. Then I watched the episode of his weekly online TV show The Grid in which, with leading wedding photographer Cliff Mautner, he argued that every photographer should assemble a portfolio featuring their very best work:
So how do you create this portfolio? You need to look dispassionately through your photos and rate them: the good; the bad and, mostly, the indifferent. It quickly struck me that the ratings system in Lightroom is the best way to do this. Here then is the criteria I am using to separate the sheep from the goats in my collection.
Two-stars is my default rating for photos. It denotes ‘snapshot’. Truly, there is no greater insult in the professional photographer’s lexicon – but, as an amateur, that is primarily what I have taken until now: landscapes taken in the middle of the day; family portraits in unflattering lighting conditions and duplicates that I can’t quite bring myself to delete. As he showed in his ‘reverse critiques’ episode of The Grid, there is a better way to take more iconic photos with less visual clutter of scenes many people take, such as cars, aircraft, wildlife and houses.
Anyway, this is an example of one of my indifferent two-star shots:
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A view of distant Exmoor taken in February 2006, not long after I bought my first DSLR, it is bland if inoffensive. Shot mid-morning, the lighting is harsh, there is little foreground interest and, apart from grass on the edge of the hillside in the foreground, most of it is slightly out of focus.
Having imported a batch of photos, my very next action is to select and rate them all as two-star images. I then work my way through them and change the ratings only of those that are better (or worse) than amateur snapshots.
Three-star photos are what I would term superior snapshots: people are looking at the camera and smiling; the weather is nicer; they are the best of that day’s shooting:
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A couple of years later, my wife and I visited The Vyne, a National Trust property near Basingstoke. The vivid Autumn colours give this shot more life but, having shot it without realising at f6.3, detail is much less sharp than it could have been. The sky is also empty and the Canada geese are swimming out of the frame.
Four-star photos are candidates for my generic portfolios – that is to say, I am building a portfolio for each of the basic genres I shoot, such as landscapes, portraits and wildlife. Here’s an architectural example, shot in Romsey Abbey:
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I used HDR to capture a wider tonal range and retain detail in, for example, the stained glass windows beyond the high altar. Boosting clarity afterwards brought out more of the texture in the stonework. Shooting at F22 meant I retained sharpness across most of the image.
Five-star photos are the best of my personal best, regardless of genre. They are the ones to which I will give my most painstaking attention in the Develop module and Photoshop itself. I expect, nevertheless, that they will will give the progressively be superseded as my technique improves.
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This engaging baby squirrel rustled out of the undergrowth during an evening walk last summer. He proceeded to gnaw at my shoe and eventually settled on a fence, where I took his likeness. I cranked the ISO up to 4000 to get the shot (in retrospect, given that I could have stopped down from f10 as shot, it didn’t need to be up so high for my 1/30 second exposure. I’m pleased that I got his face sharp, with a good catchlight in his eyes.
So what about my one-star photos? Well, they’re my duds, fit only for deletion. Rather than deleting them unrated, though, I give them my lowest rating – and this is why: were the worst to happen and I lost my computer’s hard drive, I will retrieve restore my archive from my back-up, replete with one-star photos. I will then delete the one-star photos once more, knowing that they are ones I definitely don’t want.
Note: when you try to delete dud photos from a Smart Collection, Lightroom will display an error message saying that this is not allowed. But there is a keystroke combination that will do the trick (but beware that Lightroom will start deleting images with no further ado): Ctrl (Command for Macs), Alt, Shift and Backspace.
There is no disguising the fact that rating your photos in Lightroom is not a quick job, especially if your collection is large, yet it is an essential step to understanding your strengths and weaknesses as a photographer – and what you need to do next to improve your technique.