After a long days shoot you’ll very often have hundreds of photos to process. Deciding on which photos you want to keep and edit and which you want to to get rid of can be an arduous task. But here I’ll show you a helpful technique that I use, that you can employ yourself when sorting your images using Luminar 3.
Library View
The best place to rate your photographs is in Luminar is in the Library View simply because you can compare images to one another easily. Here you can flag and rate a photo directly on the image thumbnail. There are three features you can use for easier photo management in Luminar. Star rating, Flagging / Favorite tagging, and Colour labelling,
Star Rating – You can apply a star rating by clicking on the hollow stars along the lower left of an image’s thumbnail. Photos can be rated on a scale of 0 to 5 stars. Once rated you can filter your photos by their star rating.
Flag an Image – Click the hollow heart in the lower right edge of each thumbnail. The heart can be toggled on or off with each click to mark flagged or unmarked. You can also press B on your keyboard to quickly apply a heart to an image. Pressing the X key will flag your image as Rejected.
Colour Label – You can also view colour labels on the image thumbnail. To change colours you will need to choose the Image option and then Set Colour Label. The colours you can choose are red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Afterwards, you can filter by the colour label and show images labelled with a particular colour.
How to speed up your progress
Personally, when batch labelling images in Luminar 3, I use a certain system to help speed up my process.
First I just use the Flag tool to decide between which images to keep and which images to lose. I’ll apply a Heart to any image I want to keep and Reject any that I decide are not worthy. For any photo I’m unsure of, I leave unmarked to visit later with fresh eyes.
Once I have sorted my photographs and chosen my best images I lose the rejected photos and am left with a clean library of relevant content. This then makes it much easier to apply the Star Rating system as I know I’ll only be looking through photos that I deemed appropriate I find this technique helps with Luminar library organization and means I only store the best photos, avoiding confusion and having too many images that look like slight variations of each other.