- [Instructor] Reviewing and rating your images will help
you filter out for your best or favorite photos later.
I'll show you a practical workflow
that I follow using Lightroom's three different methods
of tagging, the pick flags, star ratings, and color labels.
And we'll use chapter 20204 travel photos for this lesson.
I'm in the grid view, and I have the first image selected,
which will select the first image in the film strip.
And then I'm going to switch to the loop view,
so that we get a nice big preview.
And this is how I like to evaluate my images,
toggling or navigating my way
through here using the arrow key.
So the right arrow key to move to the right
and the left arrow key to move to the left.
To make this image even bigger,
I can collapse the side group panels with the tab key,
and now, we're ready to start giving pick flags,
that's what I like to start with.
I do a pick flag on the first round,
and we have the pick flag tool here in the toolbar.
I also have the star ratings and the color labels.
If you don't see those, click over here
on the right hand edge of the tool bar
and make sure that all three are selected,
flagging, rating, and color label.
So if I want to pick this image, I'll just click the flag here
and it'll add that flag or pick flag to it.
And then I can navigate to the right with my arrow key
and then click to add another flag.
That's a little bit slow.
There's a faster way to do that with the keyboard shortcut P
for pick flag.
So I'll keep moving to the right and then picking images.
Now, I'm doing this really fast here.
And in reality, I do do this pretty fast
and I'm really generous with this round.
If I like what I see and it's in focus,
I'm going to go ahead and pick it.
Most of these meet that criteria,
so I just want to get a good assortment of images here
for us to work with.
So I'm going through this really, really quick,
just to show you how fast you can navigate through
and add flags.
You can speed this up even more by turning
on an Auto Advance,
come up to Photo Menu and come down to Auto Advance.
And then when you hit the P key,
it automatically advances to the next image.
If you don't want that image, use your arrow key.
And then when you find one you like, hit the P key.
So again, I'm going to go through this pretty quick.
I want to get some of these images from Sydney.
I'll go forward, come all the way down here to Bondi Beach,
get some of those images, just so we have a good assortment
to work with here.
Okay, now, let's say we've picked the best images,
maybe not the best, best images,
but the good images from the travel,
and we want to back through and take a slower pass through it,
and this time, we'll give them star ratings.
To do that, we want to filter out the images
that we didn't pick at the top of the film strip all the way
over to the right hand edge is this word filter,
click on Filter.
And that opens that up,
so you see all these different labels here
and then turn on the filters with this switch
to the right hand edge of this.
Now, the only images that are in the film strip are the ones
that have the pick flag.
Let's scroll over here 'cause I know
I picked a couple images that are really similar.
So this image isn't quite as good as this image.
And if I decide at this point
that I shouldn't have picked it,
I can unflag it with a U key.
And that removed it from the filter,
but it didn't remove it from the folder.
So if I turn the filter back off,
we'll see that image is still here in the folder.
It's just hidden when we have the filter turned on.
Okay, let's go back through and add a star rating to this.
We can click on one-star, or two, or three, or four,
or whatever you want here.
Or you can use the keyboard shortcut one, two,
three, four, or five.
Now, I just give a single star at this point.
I don't want to spend a lot of time really thinking,
oh, is that one-star, or two-star, or maybe it's three-star?
That really slows me down.
So I just stick to a single star.
And then after I've finished editing a photo
and it's ready for my portfolio,
then I'll give it a five-star rating for that.
So let's see, I've gotten all the way through these
and given a handful of stars to them.
Now, we can filter this down to show pick flag plus star
by clicking almost invisible here,
but as you hover over him, you can see these stars.
So if I click on this first star,
now it's filtering this collection of images
or these folders of images down to the ones that have
both a flag and a star rating.
We have color labels that can be applied to,
and those are here in the toolbar.
If I click the red color chip,
it added a red color label to that,
and we can see it in the film strip here.
There's keyboard shortcuts for these as well,
six through nine are to apply a color label.
And six was red,
so we'll use seven to add the yellow,
and eight for the green, and nine for the blue.
And there isn't a keyboard shortcut for the purple label.
I don't actually use these for evaluating my images,
I use them to identify different file types in my catalog.
For example, my layered Photoshop files are
all colored blue, so that I can quickly spot
them when I'm in the grid view.
Let me show you what I mean.
If I turn the filters off and I switched back
to the grid view with the G key,
these ones that have color labels,
we can spot them really quickly in this grid.
I recommend that you come up with a system that works
for you and then stick with it,
make it part of your workflow,
evaluate and rate your photos before you start editing them,
finding the right image at a later time will be easy
if you do the hard work on the front-end.