![]() Keep in mind that still I haven’t evaluated the shots for composition, exposure, etc. Once the selected images are tagged in Photo Mechanic, I’m ready for the next step: bringing the images into the Lightroom catalog. Side note: If you use a Nikon camera and “protect” an image in the camera using the lock (key) button, it shows up in Photo Mechanic as “tagged.” That can be an extremely useful way of finding images that looked good on your LCD after you download them to your computer! Bringing your selects into Lightroom I set Photo Mechanic to automatically advance to the next image after I change the tag state. Use the “tag” option as a quick “yes or no” review system. Doing this advances me to the next image, too. If the photo isn’t sharp, I use the keyboard shortcut Cmd (Ctrl)- to “untag” the image, even if it isn’t tagged already. If it’s sharp, I’ll use the keyboard shortcut Cmd (Ctrl)+ to tag it and then I’m automatically advanced to the next photo. ![]() As I review each image, I check sharpness. To do this, I use Photo Mechanic’s “Tag Photo” function.īefore I begin, however, I’m going to go into the preferences and set up the application to automatically advance to the next image whenever I change the tag. I check the focus and sharpness at 100% and tag the sharp ones as keepers. Therefore, I use a simple binary approach during my first review pass. If the image isn’t sharp enough for me, there’s really no point in bringing it into Lightroom. In my situation, my first criterion for selecting images is whether or not the subject’s eye is reasonably sharp. Use Tags to Select Images in Photo Mechanic ![]() This synchronizes your keywords and other metadata with Lightroom. Set Photo Mechanic’s IPTC preferences to read and write metadata to XMP sidecar files. If you set Lightroom to use XMP sidecar files for metadata, it will be compatible with Photo Mechanic and Bridge. If you do, you risk getting your file metadata out of sync, as LR reads but won’t overwrite embedded metadata. I don’t recommend embedding XMP metadata. Next, go into Photo Mechanic’s preference panel and make sure that it’s set to write XMP sidecar files, too. This not only helps to synchronize metadata between LR and Photo Mechanic, but Bridge, too. First, make sure that Lightroom is set up to write metadata and edits into XMP sidecar files. If you intend use Photo Mechanic with Lightroom, there are a few best practices to consider. Before you begin: Synchronize Preferences In review mode, Photo Mechanic uses embedded JPEG previews to display your images quickly, even at 100%. Tip: I always set my Nikons to use an in-camera sharpening value of +3 or +4 so that the embedded previews are sharpened adequately for review. Because JPEGs are fairly small, Photo Mechanic can display them super-fast. For Nikon cameras, this is a full-resolution image, so the quality is more than enough to judge critical sharpness. Instead, it displays 100% previews using the preview JPEG embedded into your RAW files by the camera. The big difference between Photo Mechanic and Lightroom is that Photo Mechanic doesn’t render your RAW images when you zoom in. I use it to do all sorts of stuff, including image import, but here I’m just going to focus on the image review aspect of the program. I’ve used Photo Mechanic for years, and it’s a really good file browser and image keywording tool. Doing so reduces the amount of images in my Lightroom catalog and keeps my workflow streamlined. I use Photo Mechanic, from Camera Bits, for my first-pass review and to cull rejected images before I import them into Lightroom. That’s a lot of shots to review, especially when you have to judge sharpness at 100% quickly. I came back from a bird photography trip to Trinidad with over 2500 captures. I had to review over 2500 images from a recent birding trip to Trinidad. That’s exactly where a browser like Photo Mechanic can help out and save you serious time. When you’re trying to judge images for critical sharpness, you need to view them quickly, make a yes or no decision, and move on. To view images at 100% in Lightroom, you need to render 1:1 previews from the RAW files, and that takes serious time. However, there are some things that Lightroom doesn’t do quickly, and one of those things is previewing images at 100%. When photographing birds, judging sharpness of the eye is the first step in deciding whether to keep or reject an image.Īdobe Photoshop Lightroom has a lot of image management strengths, not the least of which is its catalog database. ![]() Green honeycreeper, Trinidad, West Indies.
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