My question for this thread is trying to optimize getting my photographs moved from my memory card to a folder where I will edit the images in PhotoLab 4.
It seems to me that the first step is to quickly determine which my better images are - culling. Until now, I’ve been doing this work, along with the importing, in PhotoMechanic. I thought I was satisfied with PM, until several people in this forum suggested the program “Fast Raw Viewer”, My friends here overwhelmed me with screen captures of how FRV can help me select the best images. I spent much of tonight watching videos about FastRawViewer.
From that I learned that culling images based on looking at ‘jpg previews’ is not a good idea. The images, and the histograms from jpg previews are NOT an indication of the quality of my captured images - they only look at the ‘jpg previews’, but that defeats the purpose of shooting in raw. I don’t know how other software handles this, but FRV offers so many ways to quickly evaluate images (and cull out the poor images) that I’ve decided that starting today, I will be learning and using FRV.
Hypothetical question - suppose I started out with 100 images, and as I often do, several images of essentially the same thing. By the time I finish culling, I suspect I’ll have eliminated over half of them.
I still need to find out if FRV is better than PhotoMechanic in renaming, organizing, and copying my images to my hard disk. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been using PM.
Once this is done, the editing in PL4 begins.
I again need to thank all the people who have been helping me capture the best image to later edit in PL4. That has a lot to do with finding the right camera settings for taking the image. If I get the best possible images into PL4, the editing should be easier.