Dealing with a lot of digital shots

[Muse]

I took around 500 shots at a family function with my newish Pentax K-x DSLR and want to prepare some discs to send out. I used my Pentax SMC 18-250mm lens, exclusively. I took a few (~20) RAW shots, but I've never dealt with RAW before. That was sort of an experiment. I realized soon that I didn't have a ton of space on my SDHC card (8GB), so I switched back to JPG, which was set to high quality (~5GB/shot). So, most of the shots are ~5GB, although I took a few AVI HD videos.

Most of these shots were shot in very low light at 1600, 3200 or 6400 ISO, with no flash (the K-x is exceptionally good in low light situations). The quality varies a lot and I'll want to delete a lot of them (actually, I did already, on the spot because I ran out of space on the card, however there are surely more I'll want to delete). If I send the shots unedited, it will be a lot and probably wouldn't fit on one DVD-R. So, my questions are:

1. What program or utility would be most convenient to sort out the shots in terms of what to keep and what to delete? I ask this because AFAIK, the utility I use now won't let me delete a file while looking at it. My m.o. has been to determine a picture stinks, move on to the next picture and then delete the former picture using Windows Explorer. This works but seems to me pretty cumbersome and probably unnecessary when dealing with 500 or 1000 photos!

2. In tandem with the first concern, possibly, I figure that most if not all of these shots shouldn't survive as 5GB files, but can be edited, reduced in size, a great many being cropped in the process. So many of them don't look especially hi-res, although they are quite big for JPGs. It seems ridiculous to send a lot of these as 5GB files. A lot to the casual eye look like 50kb shots!

I do have a copy of Photoshop Elements, a version from at least 4 years ago, although I don't have any experience with it whatsoever. What do you people suggest?

 

[GoSharks]

Photoshop Lightroom.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

5GB/shot?! I think you mean 5MB/shot?

For photo organization needs on a PC, I would start with Picasa and see if it meets your needs. It is free from Google. If you need more advanced then Lightroom is a good choice.

Dealing with large filesizes... well, it depends on what you want to do with them. Picasa and other similar programs will actually keep a copy of the original file, no matter what you do (although deleting a photo will get rid of it permanently). So if you crop a photo, you will see the cropped photo in Picasa, but it will have the original stored somewhere else on your disk. (Be prepared to get bigger HDD's if you don't have them already. A DSLR is a disk space hog. I've got something like half a TB of photos. With 1TB drives selling for $70, there's no reason not to simply have enough space, and stop worrying about it!

However, the file size issue does come up when (e.g.) you're sending photos via e-mail, uploading to webpages, etc. If they will only ever be viewed online (not printed) then resizing them down to a manageable size (1000 pixels on the long side? 1500px?) will do the trick. I think that Facebook, to give one example, limits photos to 800 pixels on a side. There are also various levels of JPEG quality. In your camera you might see it as "Fine" "Medium" and "Coarse" but in reality there are many levels (I think that Photoshop gives you 9 by default). This is basically telling the JPEG compression how much you want to compromise quality for file size. Most photo programs should give you some level of control over this when you save as JPEG, although some might limit it to 3 or 4 choices.

 

[Muse]

5GB/shot?! I think you mean 5MB/shot?

For photo organization needs on a PC, I would start with Picasa and see if it meets your needs. It is free from Google. If you need more advanced then Lightroom is a good choice.

Yes, 5MB.

Is Lightroom part of Photoshop or you have to buy it separately? I have Photoshop Essentials, from around 4 years ago (?), but haven't used it. Does that have Lightroom incorporated? If not, does it have some decent photo organization built in? Please excuse my ignorance. I've been using the simple stuff that came with my P&S around 2005.

 

[Lotheron]

Yes, 5MB.

Is Lightroom part of Photoshop or you have to buy it separately? I have Photoshop Essentials, from around 4 years ago (?), but haven't used it. Does that have Lightroom incorporated? If not, does it have some decent photo organization built in? Please excuse my ignorance. I've been using the simple stuff that came with my P&S around 2005.

Lightroom is a separate product that runs around $300 for a new Full version copy.

I second using Picasa as it will deal with both RAW and JPG, for free. It has very basic post processing tools that will probably be good enough for 90% of the pictures you have. If you use picasaweb, you can use piknik, which is surprisingly good for a flash based post processor. I use this at work and get some very stunning results from my 500D.

 

[tdawg]

Did Pentax supply any sort of photo manager / processor with the camera?

I personally use Lightroom; it is a great raw developer and catalog manager. I end up saving pretty much all images I take, but in Lightroom I'll quickly go through the day's images, flagging those images I want a further look at. Once whittled down, I'll go through and take a second look at the chosen images and process those I want to export as final jpegs to upload to picasa or flickr.

 

[Gooberlx2]

I'd love lightroom, but I can't spend $300. What I use is Windows Live Photo Gallery. During import, simply de-select the shots you don't want and format the card afterwards. Then I follow up with a more thorough selection within the gallery, removing shots as I move through them in the viewer. I imagine you could do the same with Picasa.

WLPG will require a RAW codec, which can be a hassle on x64 platforms. Try the codec from FastPictureViewer...there used to be a free RAW-only codec. I imagine a sleuth could still find it. Picasa doesn't use codecs.

Did Pentax supply any sort of photo manager / processor with the camera?

I imagine the k-x ships with Pentax Digital Camera Utility 4. Personally, I think it's way too cumbersome, slow and buggy for library management. The UI is complete shit too. Supplied photo processing software is something Canon definitely got right.

 

[Muse]

Did Pentax supply any sort of photo manager / processor with the camera?

I personally use Lightroom; it is a great raw developer and catalog manager. I end up saving pretty much all images I take, but in Lightroom I'll quickly go through the day's images, flagging those images I want a further look at. Once whittled down, I'll go through and take a second look at the chosen images and process those I want to export as final jpegs to upload to picasa or flickr.

I like what you say you can accomplish in Lightroom. I'm hoping I can do something similar with Picasa. I really want to do all this in a couple of days because I'm flying south.

Yes, Pentax included a CD with software that will, among other things, process RAW images. I haven't much looked at it yet. I did install Picasa 3 today on one of my machines with a newly installed OS and virtually no data. I copied over the photos I want to cull/edit and Picasa sucked them all in. There are two options, one being to suck in everything, the other to bring in Documents & Settings\etc. and a couple of other locations, but I don't ordinarily voluntarily put my photos in those places. Easy enough to just suck them all in because there's nothing else on the machine except for a couple of directories of samples (photos and videos), which I can ignore or delete from Picasa. I don't know much about it but I watched most of a 9 minute video tutorial on Picasa 2 today. I have questions about whether I'm really deleting files when I delete them from Picasa, i.e. if they are removed from the HD (I'd prefer that).

 

[Zorba]

My personal favorite is ACDSee. Been using it since ~98. Very easy to use and pretty powerful. Can do batch renaming and sizing very easily. Also there is another free program call IrfanView, I rarely use it since I have ACDSee, though.

 

[Muse]

I used Picasa (v. 3.80) yesterday in two marathon sessions to do the editing. It was two folders each with over 400 ~5.5MB JPGs (a couple of AVIs and ~20 RAW too). Learned on the fly after watching a ~5 minute video (Youtube?) on Picasa 3, obviously produced by Google. Watched it ~3 times and dove in. Worked out OK, I think. I cropped most, deleted many, brightened up a whole lot of them (shot in very dark conditions at 6400 or 3200 ASA). Used Picasa to make a DVD of the whole thing, made 6 copies and have them with me here at the airport.

 

[alrocky]

Lightroom 3 is $200 on Adobe's site until the end of the month. Amazon's current price is $170, ($80 for the Academic version) and for one hour on Black Friday for $125.

price update: $150 11-28-10

 

[JimKiler]

My personal favorite is ACDSee. Been using it since ~98. Very easy to use and pretty powerful. Can do batch renaming and sizing very easily. Also there is another free program call IrfanView, I rarely use it since I have ACDSee, though.

I second ACDSee, a great file management app for photos and editor. Or you can use it for only file management and use Lightroom for editing, which is not nearly as good for photo management.

I use ACDSee Pro 3 and use the 1to5 ratings and then filter based on rating to easily view only the photos I want when sharing.

 

[GoSharks]

I second ACDSee, a great file management app for photos and editor. Or you can use it for only file management and use Lightroom for editing, which is not nearly as good for photo management.

I use ACDSee Pro 3 and use the 1to5 ratings and then filter based on rating to easily view only the photos I want when sharing.

What's wrong with LR photo management? Apart from LR not coping too well with path changes for image files.