No…, culling wedding photos in lesser than 10 minutes is impossible, wrote Jimmy while replying back to my cold email.
Some of you also are going to read the title & will not believe that this is possible, but I am going to teach you how Jimmy is culling his weddings in 10 minutes after I introduced him to FilterPixel.
For anyone who may not know “culling” is simply the process of selecting images that you want to keep and deliver to your client. This process can take HOURS especially when you are having to sort through thousands of RAW files from a wedding day.
Before we search for any solution, let’s understand the root cause of the problem.
Why Culling is Time-Consuming?
Jimmy told me why his culling is actually slow and where his time is actually going.
1. Importing Photos to Lightroom
If you are not using PhotoMechanic or anything similar, you know yourself how much time it takes for Lightroom to render a huge amount of wedding photographs.
PS: You can use the tips from our research to save your time in Photo Editing Workflows
2. Checking Technical Issues in the Photographs
Often, trying to keep every photo which is technically perfect means having perfect focus & perfect eye quality and this consumes a lot of his time.
The process of going through every photo, clicking, zooming and checking technical glitches is obnoxious and time-consuming and this is one of the reasons why his culling efficiency is plummeting.
3. Taking a few from similar photos
While he loves all his photos, he can’t overwhelm his clients with all photos. He checks all similar photos and decides which one to finally take to the editing process. This selection for him is based on expressions & emotions.
The Solution
It is clear that Jimmy was in need of a dedicated photo culling software that can save his time and energy, get him rid of the boring and tedious culling process.
Let’s understand how FilterPixel helped Jimmy in culling his wedding under 10 minutes:
1. Importing/Exporting Raw Files
2. Culling Bad Photos Automatically
3. Selecting Best Photos With Quick Filters
1. Importing/Exporting
Rendering Fast Previews of Raw Files was taking 5-8% time for Jimmy. As FilterPixel extracts high-resolution embedded JPEGS very quickly, he can just see photos in real-time after the import.
Photomechanic generates previews better than Lightroom and in the same way as Filterpixel. Instead of waiting for raw files to load, both of the software uses JPEG’S which can be loaded quickly on the screen.
PS: You can learn the best way to cull inside PhotoMechanic from here
2. Rejecting Technically Bad Photos
Going through every photo and checking technical issues was taking 52% of his time. Not only this, the process was a pain in the neck for him. For Jimmy, any photo without focus was a total rejection. He was also checking the eye quality inside the photos manually.
When Jimmy imported to FilterPixel, all of his out of focus and closed eyes shots were classified automatically into rejected and warnings.
He spent no time in checking technically imperfect shots and now can spend most of his culling time on the photos that actually matter most to his client.
3. Quick Review & Export
We all know that AI is an assistant and not a boss. Our style is unique and only we know the definition of the best photo for us.
Smart photo culling software can provide ways to accelerate the decision process to pick your best photo.
Jimmy has taken the help of AI Metrics to narrow down his selections.
Narrowing down to the number of photos from the good photos now took 8 minutes in total for him.
At the same time, only the accepted photos were taken to Lightroom by Jimmy which saved a lot of time on Import to Lightroom for Editing.
PS: AI Sliders are introduced in FilterPixel 0.0.9 and can be checked in the latest video here
Conclusion
For Jimmy, it was hardly 10 minutes to complete the culling with AI without losing any control over the process. Now, he can spend more time on his business and family.
If you are interested to check filterpixel in action, you can check the video here: https://youtu.be/UpgSh4Jhw6c
Here, is the detailed post on How to use FilterPixel
Hope you like this post, please share it with your friends and help other photographers in saving their life hours by culling fast.
