ygelman Loc: new -- North of Poughkeepsie!

In the recent Sharpening thread,
I just looked into FRV, and it's enormous. Is there a significant advantage over Bridge just to view and reject? Bridge is free with Photoshop; FRV is $$ after a trial period.

kpmac Loc: Ragley, La

I use Faststone. It's free and does a great job.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Enormous? In what sense?

If you're paying $120 a year, every year for the rest of your life, consider how fast Bridge renders the RAW files. Is it immediate, or are you 'paying' your valuable time there too?

BTW - that $$ is literally a 1-time payment of $23.99. Maybe there's an upgrade risk in the future, but definitely not $24 per yr, nor even a risk of every other year.

BebuLamar

I do think Bridge is very slow to load (perhaps my computer isn't fast) and if FRV is much faster it's certainly worth the $23.99.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Does your state apply sales or use tax?

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I have no problem with the speed of Lightroom importing images. I import everything, THEN view them for culling. It's easy enough to mark them for editing, keeping, or rejecting and delete them from the catalog (and disk) afterwards. I'm going to want the keepers in Lightroom anyway.

On my 8 year old PC, Lightroom was a bit slow to load, but the importing was fairly fast. On my MacBook M1, everything is fast. I have no need for a preliminary viewer.

My workflow: https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/user-page?upnum=1584

On my PC, if I were just going to view an image, IrvanView was my viewer of choice. Quick to load and display. It will display raw files, but uses the embedded preview. But you can cycle through the image files in a folder with left/right arrows or spacebar/backspace. You can easily save the image with another name or with another format. Easy to add text annotation. Some basic editing functions but I rarely used them beyond infrequent cropping. For a real editor, LR/PS is my choice.

I started using IrfanView before I ever heard of FastStone. FS is similar, but I have something that works and is embedded in my muscle memory so I have no reason to change over.

ygelman Loc: new -- North of Poughkeepsie!

I mean it’s a huge program. I would only need it for viewing, not processing.
I didn’t know that Bridge renders RAW files.
Since I’m already paying for PS this is a moot point. But don’t you also pay for Lightroom?? I guess I might be confused about details.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

The photography subscription includes both PS and LR (Bridge is also mentioned, but last I heard you could download Bridge free without the subscription).

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Still don't understand 'huge program'. Doesn't seem accurate / relevant.

When you have 500 RAW images to cull, what do you do? How do you select the keepers vs those to kick? Are you looking at the 1:1 pixel level details? How fast is your tool? If not immediate, that is the purpose of FRV.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

When you have 500 RAW images to cull, what do you do? How do you select the keepers vs those to kick? Are you looking at the 1:1 pixel level details? How fast is your tool? If not immediate, that is the purpose of FRV.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

When I have 500 raw images to cull I load them all. I then start with the first one and bring it up in Loupe view. I don't bother looking down to the pixel level for culling. I look at composition and gross focus/exposure/whitebalance stuff. Sometimes there's a burst of shots so I can use the left/right arrows to look through the burst. I then pick the one I like (or at least one that has possibilities) and give it a red color label. If I don't like any of them a lot I don't give them any label. If it's an obvious dud pressing 'x' gives it a reject flag. Then the right arrow to the next one. In the edit phase I might get down to the pixel level if it's important. LR switches between images quickly. I can't imagine that FRV or other viewer would be any faster.

When I get through all the images I have some with a red color label, which will be edited and further analyzed. I have some with a reject flag. I take those and delete them from the disk. The ones without any label get deleted from the catalog, but not the disk.

I then edit those with a red color label. If I get to a point where I need to do something else it gets a yellow color label, meaning it needs more work. If I am happy with the edit it gets a green color label. If it needs to go to Photoshop it gets a blue color label. (That can include panoramas or other combined images). When I'm done, the red color labels should have been changed to yellow, green, or blue. Yellow gets more work until it merits a green label. Blue goes to Photoshop for more work. On return it's a new image, which gets a green label. That image along with the blue label original(s) get stacked. If I start editing a red label and find it doesn't really work, I remove the label.

When everything is done I'll have all green labels, with blue labels stacked under some of them. Any images unlabeled get removed from the catalog.

Typical ratio is 10% keepers, or 50 shots out of the 500. But it can vary widely.

THEN comes the rest of the work. Tagging. I want to put the names of people in the photo into the keyword list. That sometimes means looking up the name or possibly even emailing someone with the image asking who it is. If the shoot doesn't involve people, it's pretty quick. If it's something like a wedding (even a family wedding where I know most of the people) there are always people I don't know and have to research that part.

After that, if it's an event with people, the images go into a web page describing the event and the URL gets sent to the main people. They can distribute the URL as they see fit. The web page is full of thumbnails which point to the full size image so the people can download the images and get them printed or whatever.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

As step 1 (and 2, and 3): I look at the 1:1 details. If they're not in focus from an unprocessed RAW, the image will never get better. Those are deleted immediately with just 1-second's thought. Composition isn't relevant until I'm only looking at the technically superior images. Plus, I composed the images as I focused and framed while shooting. That's why I pressed the shutter. The results are generally good in the larger view, but I need a detailed assessment I can make only on a computer monitor. I load the culled results into LR creating only minimal previews. I then apply LR Develop (User) presets against all images that default the lens profiles, the AUTO WB override and my personal NR and Sharpening settings. Only then do I build the 1:1 Previews in batch. When completed, I again can run 1:1 pixel-level compares of images I couldn't decide from the stand alone culling outside LR. Final development of the images can begin after I've kicked as many inferior images from further consideration as is possible.

I try to add keywords before any detailed editing. Doing this at the start helps to make sure it gets done before the end. I also still have large numbers of similar images so multi-select of all them is efficient for keywords, even of only one of a group ever makes it to the end of all editing and continuous culling.

ygelman Loc: new -- North of Poughkeepsie!

Wow. You guys talk about editing in quantities that are many times larger than what I do. I stepped into water way over my head; if I get a couple really good images a month, I’m more than satisfied. And selling a few fine art prints per year pays more than my cost for Photoshop and Bridge.

Thank you for your interesting work flow descriptions.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Note the use of LR in both situations. Lightroom is designed for large volume, for photographers working in large volumes. One response says very few go to PS, everything else stays entirely within LR to completion. Myself, I live on with the LR6 standalone, so PS isn't even an option. Everything is LR, with an even more efficient culling program prior to LR.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I don't mean to imply that I do this frequently. Before I retired and moved away, I belonged to several organizations. I would take photos of their meetings for PR purposes. They were low budget organizations, so I didn't charge anything -- it was part of my unofficial commitment to the organization. I would probably take photos of an event once every month or two. Some of the meetings covered two or three days (seminars, trade show, awards banquet, business meeting) and I didn't have time to do anything with the shots until afterwards. Most of them were 200-300 shots. The most I recall ran about 800 shots.

Now that I'm retired I don't do the events much. Vacations account for maybe 100 shots each. For family events, in the last 5 years I did a 25th anniversary, my daughter's engagement party and her wedding. I wasn't the primary photographer for the wedding (I was part of the wedding party) but over 3 days (preparation, photos of the photographer photographing, photos of the reception, and the next day breakfast) I got about 650 shots. Otherwise I take a couple shots of my cat every month or my wife, or various family gatherings (maybe 10 shots each).

PS: The daughter's wedding had a photographer and a second shooter. Between them my very rough estimate is that they took about 2500 shots.

PPS: The only photos I ever sold were some real estate shots of my wife's house that she sold before we were married.