Seeing stars
Just writing something (for book 7) on the use of star ratings. A great way to develop consistency is by defining what your star ratings actually signify. This varies depending on what type of photographer you are, so for example a studio photographer might define 5 stars as what is good enough for the studio walls, while a stock photographer might see ratings in terms of saleability.
If you have such a mental definition, maybe write it down too – just sticking a post-it note on the screen’s side may help.
Alternatively, Lightroom’s panel end decorations, so frequently derided as a waste of programming time can, with a tiny bit of imagination, actually be made to serve more than a trivial decorative purpose.
John, I’ve just discovered your blog and I guess it’ll be a great reading 🙂
Regarding stars I’ve found a different approach from the usual one, since evaluating on the basis of 5 level is quite a long process for me… you know, staring at a picture for 2 minutes to consider if it’s a 3 or a 4 is quite stressing if you have thousands of them, I prefer to use a 3 level approach: great, good, ok.
After having filtered the cream from the crop using the P/U/X keys, the first essential step to remove clutter from the grid view, I dig through the “cream” shots to differentiate great ones from nice ones, and I start using stars, with this code in mind:
5* Great! technically perfect with magic inside
4* Good. technically perfect and shot with great timing, but not… “wow” shots!
3* Ok. just technically correct
Sometimes I found in cream something which cannot be delivered to my client:
2* beautiful, artistic shots but with technical flaws (out of focus, wrong exposure, etc)
1* shots that I reconsider as “crop”, but I prefer not to trash immediately
the difference between 3* and 2* shots is the real reason why I had to find a different way to categorize the shots. They’re both good shots but for different reasons: 3* lack a soul, while 2* have technical flaws. The first shots could be good for the client, the second are usually good for my eyes 🙂 Which of them comes first? It depends if I judge from the point of view of my client or from the one of my porfolio, and both point of view usually coexist…
After this classification I’m ready to finish my work. I prepare a collection for the client. In the collection I put all of the 4 and 5 stars shots. If they’re too few I get some of the 3* shots.
What about the 2* shots? Well, it’s not common but, if for some reason I don’t have enough 5*/4*/3* shots to complete the assignment, I could recover some of the 2 stars shots with strong cropping or postproduction. While 1 stars shots are there just because I’ve seen value in them and I’m not so sure to trash them.
Please, let me know what you think of my method and if, considering my needs, you would apply a different process.
Thanks again for your great posts on LR! 🙂