From the course: Organizing with Lightroom

Advice when using ratings - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Organizing with Lightroom

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Advice when using ratings

- While the flag system works really well, it's not very granular. You may find yourself needing to be more specific, particularly if you're doing work with clients. This is why Adobe has a star rating system and just like the movies, you could assign up to five stars. Let's go here a little bit later in the library. I'm going to come down to some photos that I captured in Chernobyl. Let's click here to start through the selection. You'll notice that we have stars, one, two, three, four and five. You could simply click to assign a rating or use the number keys of one, two, three, four and five. Tapping with the arrow key makes it easy to cycle through and you can very quickly assign ratings. This allows you to target the images that you like. Find the ones that you want to use or share. In this case, I'm just quickly navigating through and assigning ratings. Don't worry about assigning the exact same ratings if you're following along with the images, just make your own judgements here. This allows you to quickly decide what something is and assign ratings. Now you might be wondering why I included so many selfies. I don't actually use selfies very much, but later on, we're going to be talking about the facial detection features and how it can do recognition. So I did have to include a few pictures and fortunately, I don't need a model release when using pictures of myself or my family. So that makes it a little bit easier to give you some pictures to practice with. Alright, as we go through here, you see it's super easy to step through and flag the photos that I want to keep. By using a system of one through five stars, you can quickly determine the best images. Use this so that you can decide which images are worth keeping or which ones you're going to share. You may recall that earlier we discussed that images that have a Four-star or a Five-star rating will also stay synchronized to your computer. This is great so that you have them ready for editing or sharing. Alright, let's go back to the grid view. You'll notice here that several of these have now received ratings. If you select an image, you'll see that the rating updates there on the bottom. So this does make it easy to see what you've applied. As you adjust the size of the grid here as well, it will also continue to adjust and you can easily step through and see those ratings. Remember the arrow keys are an easy way to navigate your library and the shortcut keys of one through five, a great way to assign ratings. Now you might struggle with what's a Four-star, what's a Five-star et cetera. Here's my simple approach. A One-star is an image that I know is ready for deletion. It's not worth keeping, but I want to mark it so I know that I've reviewed it. A Two-star image is one that I'm going to save, but probably never use, but I'm backing it up because it might have use. A Three-star image is a perfectly fine image and one that I might share to social media. Four-star and Five-star images are the type of images that I'm going to put into my portfolio or that I might try to sell or show to a client. Now, obviously depending upon the subject matter, this is going to vary and you're going to have to decide what works best for you. Generally speaking, when looking at images, it's a good idea to consider having the image full screen, or even be able to pinch and zoom, so you can check things like critical focus. This way I know that this image is a Five-star because it shows the devastation at the Chernobyl nuclear blast. There's great depth of field and sharpness here and I really got the foreground tack sharp and I like the shallow depth the field going off into the background. But as you're rating, don't be afraid to click to zoom in and really check details. You can drag around to see the image quite easily. When you click again, it zooms back out to the entire picture. By taking the time here, this allows you to go through and find the best images. Five-stars and Four-stars are going to be backed up to your system, but use a rating system that works well for you.

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