To delete or not to delete…
Hey guys!
To delete or not to delete…. That’s the question 
Well, I wanna talk about what to do with those pictures of a photo session you do not use right away. What do you do with such photos?
Most of you will know this from their own experience: You import your photos into Lightroom (or whatever software you might use) and sort them into groups. For lack of a better name I’ll call them “Gorgeous!”, “Okay” and “junk”.
Those images you sorted into “Gorgeous!” will be send to the model, posted online or might even be good enough for your portfolio, those in the group “okay”… well, maybe you’ll have a closer look later… Yeah, maybe! And those in the “junk” category are exactly that: junk! 
Out of focus, strange faces and stuff like that.
Well now, what to do with those images? I was confirmed in what I used to do, last weekend when I took some of my images from both the “Gorgeous!” and the “okay!” group to TION and someone told me to try and convert for of the images into black & white. Did it and was taken aback!
Here’s my workflow: I go through my images in Lightroom and mark everything out of focus or otherwise unusable as rejected. Every once in a while I go through my catalog and and delete all those I rejected. I only keep a few of them for use in articles and video tutorials where I need some truly unusable images sometimes to show something.
When I’m done with that there are only those images from the “okay” and the “gorgeous” group… Yeah, those category names are so creative.. Well, nevermind…
Those images I categorize as “Gorgeous!” I mark in Lightroom with a dark red color (as in my logo…) and put them into the Quick Collection until they are retouched, exported for print, blog and the client/model.
The images that are left untouched (those of the group “okay”) remain this way in my catalog. No color, no flags, no collection, no nothing SOmetimes I go and try something with some of them in LR, Photoshop or Niksoftware only to decide I don’t like the effect afterwards. It might even happen that I upload one of them to my blog or G+ or something but mostly I forget about them.
Of course, keeping them costs disc space, increase the size of my LR catalog and stuff like that, but I can’t bring me to deleting them. And as my LR-catalog is quite well sorted, tagged and marked with colors I rarely have problems finding an image if I search for it..
And after re-editing those four images that I had totally forgotten about I feel ensured to go on like that. Well, they still are none of my favorite images but I like them now and I even added one of them to my couples-portfolio
If your interested: Those are the four images I talked about:
What’s your workflow?
Love,
Kate
