Tips to Speeding Up Your Lightroom Develop Workflow

One of the primary advantages of a Lightroom-centric workflow is the ability to speed up post-processing and decrease the amount of time spent behind a computer. Here is a quick list of the some of the ways in which to speed up the time spent in the Develop section. This is geared in particular to large batches of images; the type of photography that event photographers would potentially have to deal with. However, the tips will benefit anyone having to work through a large amount of images with similar tonal attributes (Sports, Wildlife, Portrait etc.)

The Upgrade Path - Where To Spend your Money

There are oodles of new bits of kit hitting the market at the moment and it’s likely to only get more exciting as Photokina pops up on the near horizon. Wow, all the new toys. Which leads to the usual round of “should I upgrade”? To be entirely honest I have been in a similar quandary over the last few weeks. The announcement of the new Fujifilm XT-2 has had me practically salivating at the prospect of shooting with it. However, a careful look at the work that I shoot made me reappraise my longing for the small Fujifilm and think more carefully about needs vs. wants. A discussion with the Durban photographer Graham Carruthers, who is also very much entrenched in the Fujifilm camp, further cemented my thoughts on the so-called upgrade path.

Is Passion Important?

You often hear the advice that one should ‘follow one’s passion’. I want to break this down a little. What exactly do ‘they’ mean by ‘passion’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary that I still keep like a bible next my desk, passion is: 1) a strong, barely controllable emotion, 2) an outburst of anger, 3) intense sexual love, 4) strong enthusiasm. The wording really revolves around the intensity of the emotion. In some ways the Concise OED doesn’t quite define the intensity of the interest enough. The online urban dictionary does a better job in my opinion (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Passion):

“Passion is when you put more energy into something than is required to do it. It is more than just enthusiasm or excitement, passion is ambition that is materialized into action to put as much heart, mind, body and soul into something as is possible.”

Understanding the Difference Between Catalogues, Folders and Collections.

When you have been working with a programme for years you can sometimes forget how confusing some of the basic concepts of that application can be to someone just starting out with that programme. A case in point is Lightroom. I have been using the programme pretty much since it’s inception. At first I only really used it to catalogue my finished images, preferring instead to rely on Nikon’s slow but image quality superior Capture NX 2. When Nikon ditched upgrades to their app, I was forced to swallow the Adobe pill completely. Still, this has meant working with Lightroom in a limited or full capacity for the last 10 years. Sometimes, as my assistant reminds me, I forget that the way Lightroom handles files can be confusing and frustrating to many. The single biggest ‘issue’ I have come across is the confusion between Catalogues, Folders, Files and Collections. Here is a rough guide to work one’s way through the confusion.