This is my next job. And a job I have been waiting a few months to start. Well ever since I went to Santorini in April.
There are various strands to this, so by way of an introduction this is what I will be working on and writing about next.
First and foremost, the pictures I took when I went to Santorini earlier on this year.
You can see the screenshot from Lightroom. 2254 images.
Firstly, I need to select the images I want to process. That will be at least one post, on how I sort out over 2000 images from one trip.
Next will be all the things I do to such a set of images before I get around to editing them.
- Select
- Rate
- Reject
- Delete
- Keyword
- Caption
- File
- Back-up
All this must be done before I do any edits. Otherwise I will find something I like the look of and edit that, and never get to the end of the set of images.
Distraction is a dangerous thing!
No. I have the time to do this in an organised and structured way – and that is the point of this exercise. To give myself time to work on the images from a special trip. This will provide a blueprint for me for future trips, as well as trips I have already been on.
Once I have selected images of interest, I am going to process them as I usually do in Lightroom and Photoshop. When I say as I usually do I mean using the latest refinements of my digital image processing. This is the processing that I would do for portfolio images.
And once I have done this, I am then going to try a few new image processing techniques.
So, I have to choose some images to work on.
I have browsed the images I took in Lightroom Mobile on my iPad Pro, and hope that there will be somewhere between 10 and 20 really good images at the end of this exercise. If there are more then fine. If there are less fine.
If I have captured 20 images worthy of consideration for my portfolio I will be delighted.
I know – 20 images out of 2000 – that is quite a low hit rate!
I will select images that I want to edit, and am happy to spend time editing. Images that are good enough to be put up for sale. And this will be the new benchmark.
And images that are worthy of being in the first selection in the new category on my website entitled travel photography – Santorini.
There are also videos I took and pictures of my camera setup and the views I was capturing. These will all be included in the posts on my photography blog.
I also have pictures of my gear in action. Well I say in action, in use is probably more realistic!
And even some pictures of me. Looking a bit bedraggled to be fair!
And once I have processed each and every image how I would normally, I am going to process them again using the following.
- Luminosity Masks using Raya Pro – bought last year but I have never had the time to experiment properly.
- Luminar software – the windows beta was released in July which I am looking forward to trialling.
- Aurora HDR – if it has been released on Windows by the time I have had a proper go with Luminar.
- And also, software on my iPad.
I am going to spend the time to learn how to use these different methods of processing images, and decide which if any of these I want to use going forwards, or if I am happy to stay as I am with Photoshop and Lightroom. I might process just a selection using these different photo editing software products – let’s wait and see. I do need to give each of the software products proper time to learn them though, to inform me about which I will be using in the future.
I want software that is quick and easy to use that takes the images processed in Lightroom to another level. That or it replaces processing images in Lightroom altogether?
Once I have done this, and have my completed sets of images, I will upload them for sale to stock sites.
But I need to decide which stock sites. For that I need to read a book. But that will be a separate post.
I am allowing myself a period of two months, December 2017 and January 2018, to concentrate on these things alone, with the following outputs.
- A selection of images from Santorini.
- A fully edited set of images using Lightroom/ Photoshop.
- Alternative edits of the image set using Luminosity Masks.
- Alternative edits of the image set using Luminar.
- Alternative edits of the image set using Aurora HDR.
- Alternative edits of the image set using other software on my iPad. Software to be confirmed!
- An alternative black and white set of images – software to be confirmed.
- A plan and a process for stock submissions.
- A plan and a process for behind the scenes videos, and how they are uploaded to You Tube.
- A new website category called Travel Photographer, with a page with called Santorini.
That should do it!
2200 images. 10 outputs. 2 months.
Time to get on!
And a last minute change – 10 quick edits. Sorry can’t wait. This I will do first and then take my time over the rest of it!