Editing photos using a bigger screen

- Shooting can be tough. There's a lot of gear to carry, a lot of decisions to make, a lot of stress about wondering if you're going to get the right shot, so after a hard day of shooting, when it's time to start post-production, I like to repair here to my image-editing lounge where I sit in a big comfy chair and I figure out which images work and which don't. I am lying through my teeth, I have nothing like this at home, and it's great. I wish I had a chair this comfortable, I'm going to have to look into that. I'm here to show you though, a different possibility for one part of your post-production workflow.

When you get back after shooting a bunch of stuff, one of your first tasks is to sort through it, figure out what the pic images are, assign keywords and ratings, and that kind of thing, and if you work in Lightroom, that usually means you're sitting at your computer, pounding away on the keyboard, your eyes glazing over as you bathe in the radiation of a big computer screen. I'm doing it differently now, thanks to an iPad app called Lightroom Sorter, made by a company called CTRL+Console. This is an app that works in conjunction with my computer. So what's going on is I've got my computer running Lightroom, hooked up to a projector, that's shining up there on the wall.

Lightroom Sorter is running on my iPad, and it is communicating via wi-fi to my computer. Really, all it's doing, it's a really nice front-end for just sending key commands to the computer, so there's a little bit of software that's running on the computer, that's listening to the wi-fi channel, and when it gets the keyboard command for Next, it goes to the next image, and I got a big button here that says Next. Up on the screen I can see my first image is selected, and I can move back and forth with Next and Previous to select different images, and the rest of the buttons work the same way.

They send a keyboard command that lets me drive Lightroom. There is nothing that I can do with this that I can't do with Lightroom. What it does is it just gives me this extension away from the computer, so that I can sit back here and get to work on my post-production. I'm going to hit the Full Screen button here to go to a Full Screen view of my first image. I'm just going to start going - oh, I like that one. I'm going to give that three stars by hitting the three star button, and you can see the three stars appearing there at the bottom. Now I just go through my workflow just as I always would, finding the pic images that I like, giving them good ratings, and moving on to the next image.

I can also flag an image using the Flag command, just like I would in Lightroom. I can add red, yellow, green, or blue labels. So I can do all of the sorting and tagging that I normally would. I'm going to return to Grid view now. Over on the right-hand side, is my normal panel of controls, including my keywording controls. There are the suggested keywords and the normal keyword set. I didn't know this until I got CTRL+Console, but there are actually keyboard shortcuts for the keywords, keywords that are not the suggested keywords, which are the ones that you've used recently.

If you hold down the alt key, numbers will light up showing you the corresponding number for that keyword. This woman's name is Randy Wallace, I have a keyword in there that says Randy Wallace, it's in the two position. So up here, I have a keyword selection of one through nine, if I hit two, than it says, adding keyword Randy Wallace. If I set up my keywords properly, I can easily go through here and keyword while I'm sitting here. You may think this is gratuitous and silly to have all this extra work just to do the things that you could do sitting at your computer, but it's really not for certain applications, and one of those would be working with somebody else, working with a client, working with Randy.

Rather than having to crowd around a computer, particularly if it's a small laptop, we can plug the computer in to a TV, or go back to my iMac, which has a nice big screen, and just have room to stand further away. I can drive with this, I can even let her drive, with a very refined set of controls, I don't have to worry about her doing something else because she's locked into just the sorting and rating controls. Personally, what I feel this is really good for for me, is it gets me away from the keyboard and the mouse. Years and years of using a computer have just thrashed my hands. The less I have to go use those tools and stay in that position, the better off I am physically.

So to be able to sit in a chair or stand somewhere else in the room and work, is really great. Another cool thing is that the developers have built one piece of functionality into this that you don't actually have in Lightroom. Up here at the top, I have a button that says Survey. This is the one odd interface thing in this application. That word Survey does not mean I'm in Survey mode right now, it means that I can switch to Survey mode, and when I do, it shows me the next six images. This is kinda nice because I don't have to look at them one by one, I can compare, and look at them in batches at a time, so I can make relative assessments of my images.

You might look at an image and go, well, that's nice but I don't know, maybe I've got something better. This at least let's me look at six at a time to get an idea of the ones that I like. I'm going to tag that one, and as I tag them, it pulls them out, and then I can simply hit the Next Six button to go to another batch. Again, this is Lightroom Sorter, made by a company called CTRL+Console. They make similar control surfaces for the iPad for driving Premier and Final Cut. They give you jog controls, editing controls.

Again, for group environments, just getting away from the computer, maybe you have a bigger TV than you have a computer, so you wouldd like to see your images larger when you're sorting, this is a great tool, reasonably priced, very easy to work with.