![]() The image viewed is the true Raw file, and superfast exposure adjustments can be made via keyboard shortcuts. On the other hand FastRawViewer is astonishingly good. It’s fast, but also very expensive, and only looks at the embedded JPG, so does not have all the Raw information and detail for culling that is needed for bird images. Many bird photographers swear by Photo mechanic, but I am not a fan. Lightroom requires a very time consuming import of photos, 95% of which will then be discarded, and is dismally slow once they are imported. ![]() The industry leaders here are Photo mechanic, Lightroom itself, and FastRawViewer. My requirement for offloading the work to specialised packages is that they must be industry leaders, and also offer batch processing. So the solution is to either leave Lightroom completely behind, or use it in conjunction with other more specialized packages. What Lightroom is superb at, is managing a workflow, cataloguing, and adding metadata to images. Lightroom is behind the leaders in all of these areas, and only has only rudimentary batch capability. Finally, as cropping is almost always involved, some level of resizing is needed also. Thirdly, bird images require subtle levels of sharpening, at different levels for the wings as opposed to the eyes and beak for example. Secondly, as shutter speeds have to be high (and I live in the UK) high ISO noise reduction is almost always required. Firstly, there is a need for high speed culling of images, based on their fine detail. Bird photography has some special requirements for post processing that Lightroom is not the industry leader in. Lightroom has many great qualities, but it is a generalist app. This was now wedding photographer territory in terms of the image volume but with the added requirements of specialised bird photography post processing. What do you do if you have 800 incredible images? In my case I had great difficulty in deciding which ones to keep or which ones to drop, and I realised I would need to process at least 200 of them before I could judge the best of the best. This level of keeper rate brought its own problems. Over two days( but still under 3 hours of shooting) I got 11,400 images of which around 800 were of landing events. What do I mean by high frame rate? Well in a recent post I described how using the Olympus EM1x I took 4382 shots of Gannets landing in 61 minutes, of which 3325 (76%) were in focus and 398 (12%) of those were exceptional shots which captured the perfect moment. In this post I describe a new workflow to address this special requirement, which reverses the normal direction. Lightroom is a wonderful product, and I am wedded to it, but it does not provide a complete environment for post processing of high frame rate bird photography. ![]()
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