Managing Images
I’m still looking through my images: deleting, rating, assigning keywords. Thanks to Bruce Fraser’s “Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2” I’m quite fluent in Bridge and its image rating tools (0 – 5 stars plus five optional colors), but I’m having trouble coming up with a system of what these stars and colors mean. This post is an attempt to come up with a permanent system so that two images with the same rating are of similar “quality”.
My proposal is this. A photo without any stars has not been rated yet. One star is the lowest rating, and all images that do not deserve one star get deleted.
- * — typical snapshot; representative of a place or an event; a photo without technical flaws but also without artistic merit
- ** — interesting and technically competent, but still without artistic merit
- *** — some artistic value; can be shown in an internet forum; non-photographers will be impressed
- **** — good enough to be printed; clear theme, technically and artistically very good; invokes some emotion in the viewer
- ***** — portfolio-class image; among the 25 best I’ve ever produced
I’ve yet to find good use for all color labels, but I use these two:
- green — funny situation or funny pose
- purple — a nice pose or expression of a person; he or she would be very happy to have this image
Hello
Great cataloging system but will you ever use a 3 star or less?
I use the 3 second rule in CS Bridge or Adobe LightRoom (which I prefer for edit viewing), load the images and speed through them. When one catches your eye,
think 1. focus 2. clarity 3. color — then tag it, I use 5 ***** for all, when your done with the fast rough edit, filter out your 5 ***** tagged and study each image throughly for final edit. This method works well when you think in editorial terms, when you pick up a magazine at a news stand, you flip through it and maybe see each page for 1 second, but then certain images jump from the page and you pause right? Think of your editing in the same fashion…
ALSO I love your images so far, keep it up!!
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Hi photo444,
yeah, I give lots of *, **, and ***. In fact * is the most common rating. If I understand you right, you are saying I should just throw away everything below ****. Maybe you are right, but I find it hard to completely erase an image. I always think that maybe one day I’ll be good enough in Photoshop to fix the image.
Plus when my friends say “You were in Sweden for two weeks, show us some images”, I can’t just show them a handful of **** and ***** images… The way I see it, *, ** and *** are for non-photographers and **** and ***** are for photographers.
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