Today I wanted to share some of my behind the scenes ways to quickly cull + edit an image gallery whether it’s my own or a clients.
Keyboard Shortcuts
If you’re not familiar with keyboard shortcuts, they are a genius lifesaver that keeps your fingers on the keyboard while getting things done that would normally need the mouse (which slows you down!).
View the whole list of official Adobe Lightroom Keyboard shortcuts
If you are already a keyboard shortcut pro and want to supercharge your process, look at macros. I’m on a mac and love Keyboard Maestro. With a few well designed macros, you can set your own keyboard short cuts to trigger a series of actions you’d normally take in a row.
With Keyboard Maestro, I was able to set up some really sweet keyboard shortcuts that trigger from the extra buttons I have on my Wacom tablet that allow me to speed up editing in Photoshop.
Culling
Someday I’ll do a walkthrough on what I think are the best practices for culling out the good/bad images before you edit the gallery. Today I just wanted to give you my single biggest tip: select by “yes” instead of rejects.
If you’re a typical photographer, you shoot A LOT which means you’ve got a ton of images to get through fast. When you choose the yes images instead of the no’s, you save a ton of keystrokes and effort because there are fewer of them.
Side tip: If you don’t have auto advance after flagging turned on in your culling software of choice (Photo Mechanic, Bridge, Lightroom), turn it on! It will save you even more keystrokes and speed culling up even more!
And if you’re not already using keyboard shortcuts for flagging images during culling, start with learning those keyboard shortcuts first as they will help you speed up your process a ton!
Questions about speeding up the editing process?
Feel free to leave comments below with your questions and let me know what else you’d like me to talk about!
