Post Processing in Lightroom

In this article, I will show you tips for beginners on post-processing in Lightroom. There are two main steps I go through to edit my images:

1. Rating and adding metadata
2. Preparing for upload to stock agencies

Rating and adding metadata

After a shoot, I like to finish editing all my images before I go out again, which sometimes means 18-hour days if I’m on safari in Africa!

I usually go through a six-step process:

1. Import
2. Rate
3. Check
4. Process (including cropping and basic edits in the Tone panel)
5. Add metadata (including titles, keywords, and geotags)
6. Export (4- and 5-star images only)

Import

I often take up to 1,000 pictures on a game drive, so time is of the essence when I’m trying to import them to my laptop. The method I use is based on an article I read a few months ago. It relies on the fact that all RAW files contain embedded previews and is designed to reduce import times by 90% (from 30 minutes to 3 minutes for 1,000 files) – so it’s worth trying!

To give you a clear picture of how it works in practice, here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. I attached the cable to the camera(s) and imported files to a new folder on my Apple MacBook Pro laptop using Image Capture software.
2. Open Lightroom and ‘add’ them to my Lightroom catalog using the Import dialogue screen (Command-Shift-I on the Mac)
   • Ensure the ‘Replace embedded previews with standard previews during the idle time’ checkbox is NOT checked in Preferences/General.
   • Under Build Previews, select ‘Embedded & Sidecar’.
   • Do NOT check the Build Smart Previews box.
   • Finally, click the Import button.

Rate

Once my files are in Lightroom, I go to the relevant folder and do a ‘first pass’, rating any images that are worth selling either as three-star, four-star or five-star. (I generally give just one or two stars for any shots of people or places I want to keep for personal reasons.) I can do this simply by pressing the relevant number keys, so it’s swift and easy to do.

Note that I don’t do anything for the files I don’t want. I leave them there until I’ve finally finished all my editing, and then I can select them using the Unrated filter in the Library module and delete them all in one go.

Lightroom’s performance has always been an issue for me, and even though Adobe has made many improvements, I recently had to buy myself a very expensive new laptop to avoid all the frustrating time I spent waiting for images to load!

That’s where this import method comes into its own.

It’s very quick, which means I don’t have to go off and have a shower while the import process chugs away. However fast my computer is, it’s still worth trying all the possible tips and tricks to make it work faster.

However, this particular trick relies on rating pictures exclusively in the Library module, so I have to be careful not to start cropping or editing any images in Develop, or the CPU will get ‘distracted’ again and start slowing down…

Check

Once I’ve gone through all the shots once, I filter out the unrated shots and look again at the ones that are three stars or better, pressing the 0 key to delete the rating for any duplicates or images that don’t quite make the cut.

I make just over a third of my photography income from selling my images through stock agencies, so the key question I ask myself when rating them is, “Would a stock agency accept this file?” Agencies reject pictures for many reasons, but the main ones I concentrate on are softness and duplication.

I’m a big fan of sharpness, and I have to be disciplined with myself if I see what I think is a great image that is just too soft where it matters—which is usually the eye of the bird or animal. Without the eye being sharp, I can’t sell the picture—however much it hurts…!

Duplication is another problem. I might take dozens of images of a cheetah sitting in the savannah. All the ones I rate three stars or above might be outstanding individually, but any decent stock agency might simply pick the best one or two and reject the rest because they were ‘too similar in content.’ And that means I have to do the same. That’s a lot easier on a ‘second pass’ because I know by then how many sitting cheetahs I have, and it’s reasonably easy to see the close substitutes by looking at them all in grid view.

Process

When I’m on a shoot, I often have very little time to work on my images, and sometimes I can’t face-edit every single one in Lightroom, so sometimes I’ll leave it until later. I upload 100 images a week to my stock agencies and check them all in advance for problems such as sensor spots, black-and-white clipping, or visible logos. That means it doesn’t matter if I don’t make every shot as perfect as I can on the day I took it. However, I usually make sure I’ve done a little essential work on all of them:

• Cropping
• Tone control
• Sharpening
• Vignetting

Cropping

Cropping is relatively easy: just press the R key and then X to toggle from portrait to landscape. (One quick way of cutting out around half the image is to press X twice. The first time, it switches the aspect ratio, but the second time, it switches back, and the image is cropped to about 50%. That saves me a lot of time…!)

Tone control

Most processing can be done in the Tone panel, but I usually press the Auto-tone button at this stage and see what happens. Usually, it’s a good start, and I can tweak the individual controls afterward.

Sharpening

Adobe has recently changed Lightroom’s default settings, so sharpening is built into every image. That’s not very helpful as I like to sharpen ‘properly’ using Topaz Sharpen AI or DeNoise AI. All Lightroom does is alter the contrast, which isn’t sharpening at all, so I apply a global preset to all my images to reset the Sharpening slider to zero.

Vignetting

Most wildlife images look better with a subtle vignette to darken the image’s corners, thereby emphasizing the subject in the center. I usually add a vignette using a preset to set the Post-Crop Vignetting Style to Highlight Priority and the Amount to -20. The only exception comes when the image has a lot of sky. A vignette like that would look weird, so I generally leave it out. If I’m working on one of my favorite images, I might use a radial filter to create the vignette. That makes a more gradual and less pronounced effect, but it’s time-consuming, and creating a preset for it doesn’t work correctly as it never quite ends up in the same place! One for Adobe to work on for the next Lightroom release…

Add metadata

This is a time-consuming part of post-processing. Metadata is essential if you want to sell your photos via stock agencies. Still, it’s also beneficial to filter my photographs, for instance, by selecting just my pictures of elephants. Unfortunately, images of elephants don’t come with a note in the RAW file saying ‘This is an elephant’, so I have to add that information myself!

I populate all the primary fields in the Default metadata view:

• File Name
• Title
• Caption
• Copyright
• Copyright Status
• Creator
• Sublocation

…And also a few IPTC fields:

• Contact
  • Creator
  • Address
  • City
  • State / Province
  • Postal Code
  • Country / Region
  • Phone
  • E-Mail
  • Website
• Content
  • Headline
  • City
  • State / Province
  • Country / Region
  • ISO Country Code

That may seem like an awful lot, but fortunately, it’s possible to set up metadata preset for every shoot location. I only have to enter the contact, copyright, and location details once. I also create a location in the Maps module and copy all the images, which automatically populates the GPS field.

Naming each image is a massive job, but when it comes to the File Name, Title, Caption, and Headline, I save myself time by keeping them all the same. There’s a Lightroom plugin by John Beardsworth called Search Replace Transfer, and it lets me copy one field to another for as many files as I like, which makes it a lifesaver! Admittedly, the free version only enables you to change 10 files simultaneously, but the paid version is relatively cheap, so it’s well worth the investment. All I need to do is name all my files by changing the File Name field and then copy that text to the Title, Caption, and Headline. Goodness knows why Lightroom doesn’t allow essential word processing functions like that, but ‘there’s an app for that, as they say…!

Keywords are a bit of a pain. Stock agencies want photographers to add between 10 and 50 keywords to every image, which takes time. What I do is to make sure the File Name includes the name of the species (if it’s a wildlife shot), and I can then use a text filter to select all the elephant pictures, say, and use the spray can to ‘paint’ them all with the relevant Keyword Set for that species. I’ve set up Keyword Sets for all the species in my entire back catalog, so adding half a dozen keywords in one go is relatively easy. I’ve also set up Keyword Sets for certain common behaviors or situations, so that helps, too. It’s important to remember all the possible synonyms, so my ‘Sunrise’ Set, for instance, contains ‘sunrise’, ‘sunup’, ‘dawn’, and ‘Golden Hour’. Again, I can select all the shots with ‘sunrise’ or ‘dawn’ in the title and add all the relevant keywords. Finally, there are an awful lot of keywords that are common to almost all the images I take in a particular location, so it’s relatively easy to add a whole list, such as ‘Africa’, ‘Kenya’, ‘Masai Mara’, ‘Maasai Mara’, ‘safari’, ‘savannah’, ‘wildlife’, ‘animals’, ‘Nature’, ‘travel’ and ‘no people’.

Export

I’m pretty active on social media and enter quite a few competitions, so it’s handy to have copies of my best shots to upload to various places. That’s why I export my 4-star and 5-star images to folders on my hard drive for easy access. I also copy them to my iPhone to quickly show people my favorite shots. Regarding the 3-star photos, I leave them in RAW format until I need to upload my latest batch to the stock agencies.

Preparing for upload to stock agencies

Design Pics

I have an exclusive deal with a stock agency called Design Pics, and they generally get better prices for my work, so I give them first refusal on all my shots. As a result, I send them low-res versions of everything as soon as I return from any of my photographic trips. It takes them a few weeks to decide on their ‘selects’, but they generally pick around 10-15% of the images I send them. I can then export them appropriately and send them the hi-res pictures they need.

Every agency has different format requirements and naming conventions, so I must consider them when exporting my images. Design Pics like the Headline field to read ‘NA’, for instance, so I have to use the Search Replace Transfer plugin to ensure that’s the case. They also dislike pure blacks or white in their images, so I’ve created a plugin to set their recommended values for the Tone Curve panel (-5 for Highlights and +5 for shadows). All that takes time again, but presets make life much easier. When exporting files, I’ve set up export presets for almost every agency and organization I’ve ever sent pictures to, so it’s usually just a case of clicking on the correct name in the Export dialogue box and pressing the Export button.

Microstock agencies

Once Design Pics have chosen the images they want, I can send the rest to all my microstock agencies. ‘Microstock’ means stock photos sold at much lower prices, so the standard rate I get from these agencies is only a few cents for each download. However, what they lack in value, they make up for in volume, so it’s still worth the effort.

At various points, I’ve used as many as 25 microstock agencies, but I’ve gradually whittled it down to a dozen based on sales performance:

• 123RF
• 500px
• Adobe
• Alamy
• Bigstock
• Depositphotos
• Dreamstime
• EyeEm
• iStock
• PantherMedia
• PIXTA
• Shutterstock

I used to upload all my images to all the microstock agencies. Still, my thinking now is that picture editors know what’s out there, so I imagine they sort the microstock databases by ‘newest first,’ which means it’s good to be a regular contributor!

I need to keep track of the status of all my files, so I keep a master spreadsheet called Photography.xlsx. That has the titles of all my files and records all sorts of details about them:

• Rating
• On sale flag
• Batch number
• Date of trip
• Continent
• Country
• Headline
• Title
• Downloads
• Microstock flag
• Design Pics flag
• Sales (prints, cards, and postcards)
• Stock (prints, cards and postcards)
• Exhibitions
• Online galleries
• Competitions Entered
• Social media use (website, Instagram, etc)

All that information might seem a tad excessive, but I love making lists, and it makes life an awful lot easier now that I have over 16,000 images on sale!

Anyway, here are the steps I go through (with explanations where necessary):

• Delete the previous week’s files from the Latest Images folder
• Open Excel
  • Open Photography.xlsx workbook
  • Sort image list by Title (ascending), Design Pics (ascending), Date (descending)
  • Add next sequential batch number to 100 files
  • Add flags to On Sale and Microstock columns [‘y’]
  • Copy the first title in batch [to use in Lightroom]
  • Clear filters
  • Sort again by downloads
  • Close Excel
• Open Lightroom
  • Sort folder by File Name (A-Z) and use Microstock filter [to exclude Design Pics files]
  • Search for the first title in the batch
  • Select 100 pictures
  • Check <=50 keywords in people shots and bird species present
  • Auto-tone (and check shadows)
  • Check black and white clipping
  • Remove sharpening
  • Turn on Visualise Spots and remove logos, sensor spots, etc
  • Copy titles to captions and headlines
  • Export files to the Latest Images folder using Microstock preset [19,500K sRGB JPEGs with the filename taken from the Title field]
  • Close Lightroom
• Open Topaz Sharpen and/or DeNoise AI
  • Use Sharpen/DeNoise as appropriate
  • Limit file size to 20MB afterward using Lightroom Microstock preset again
• Open FileZilla
  • Upload images to each agency (123RF, Adobe, Alamy, Bigstock, Depositphotos, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and PantherMedia)
• Open Google Chrome
  • Open web upload pages for 500px, EyeEm, iStock, PIXTA
  • Upload images
  • Open FTP processing pages for 123RF and PantherMedia
  • Import 123RF and PantherMedia images
  • Submit files for all agencies (adding model releases, categories, and locations)
  • Add to Shutterstock sets.

And there you have it! That’s how I use Lightroom, Excel, and Topaz Sharpen AI to facilitate my post-processing workflow. Feel free to share this post if you find it useful.

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