Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Digital Asset Management => Topic started by: kengai on June 10, 2018, 04:37:39 am

Title: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: kengai on June 10, 2018, 04:37:39 am
What do you think of this software?
I use Lightroom, but I've heard about it very well.
How did you include Photo Mechanic in the workflow with LR?
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: stamper on June 10, 2018, 05:14:51 am
Use it to cull images before importing all of them into LR.
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: john beardsworth on June 10, 2018, 06:30:26 am
What do you think of this software?
I use Lightroom, but I've heard about it very well.
How did you include Photo Mechanic in the workflow with LR?

It's a fast way to review pictures and add metadata tags, and is good at what it does. I would only bother with it if you often have large numbers of photos to review and have no need to adjust images as part of the review process.
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: Joe Towner on June 11, 2018, 03:53:59 pm
PhotoMechanic is great for sports shooters, or anyone working under a deadline to deal with lots of photos.  PM doesn't need to do the import that Lightroom does, so things like quickly culling shots to the ones that you can upload is huge.  It's not an editor, it's a cull, crop/basic adjustment & caption tool.  AP & USA Today Sports live & die by it.

My other favorite feature is the variable code replacement, so you can quickly (and correctly) get player captions built without copy & paste.  http://wiki.camerabits.com/en/index.php/Speeding_Up_Captioning

The 30 day free trial should give you plenty of experience to see if it is right for you.
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: Ray R on July 12, 2018, 05:50:03 pm
I occasionally use PhotoMechanic when I photograph time trials - using the code replacement. I download the start sheet then use a spreadsheet to convert it to a .txt.

When set up correctly, I only need to add the cyclists number, the name, club and category are then added automatically.

I then import into Lightroom.

I find that even with a small number of riders (30?) it is much quicker keywording and adding a description than doing it in Lightroom.

I don' t tend to cull in PhotoMechanic as I don't use it enough.

Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: Alan Klein on July 12, 2018, 10:09:48 pm
I use Irfanview when I want to review, delete and make simple crops and changes sizes.  You can do mass changes to labels and other basic applications.  It's free. 
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: langier on July 13, 2018, 09:53:40 am
Love Photo Mechanic since I first tried it while shooting for America 24/7 years ago. It make my digital work manageable.

When I travel, I literally shoot from 500-1200 shots a day, same with many of my projects.

It allows me to ingest the files from multiple cards at one time without worry about overnighting duplicate file numbers, rename, add metadata for my DAM system, cull, sort, rate, rename, and organize my photos, all before I get to the nitty-gritty of processing photos. It's great for captioning & keyboarding, IMO. And it's pretty quick when you've got a bunch of images and a short time to deal with them. It even allows me to organize my video clips since I shoot both still and video.

For me, it's essential and makes the digital process manageable.

It's really a good way to prepare your images for import into Lightroom for some, or like me, to prepare the photos for post processing in Photoshop. In fact, it dovetails directly into Photoshop quickly and easily.

When I need to find photos at a later date, Photo Mechanic also dovetails its search feature into Spotlight for finding my files. This makes them easier to find since a direct search using Spotlight brings up every last file not an image until one fine-tune the parameters.

IMO, I couldn't manage my photography without Photo Mechanic.
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: Ken Bennett on July 13, 2018, 10:15:55 pm
Love Photo Mechanic. It's super fast for downloading from the card(s), initial edit (culling), changing filenames, and adding metadata like captions and keywords. PM lets me save detailed presets for their IPTC Stationery Pad to make that process easier, and if you do keywords, their Structured Keywords Panel might change your life. It sure did mine.

Once I've done all that, I go back through and add 5 stars to the files I want to process in Lightroom. Then I import the folder into LR and the 5-star tags show up there, too. All the other metadata makes it through the raw processing and is embedded in the final jpegs that get uploaded to our online archive for my colleagues to use.

Note that PM takes a while to set up and get working for fastest results. Learning the keyboard commands is a huge time saver (as it is for LR and PS.)
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: Alan Klein on July 14, 2018, 07:35:51 am
Does PhotoMechanic see RAW for Sony RX100M4?
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: Ken Bennett on July 23, 2018, 05:14:57 pm
As I understand it, Photo Mechanic "sees" the embedded jpeg in the raw file, or the full-size jpeg if you shoot raw+jpeg (and stacks them so you only see one file.) It's not processing raw files to view them.
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: jrp on August 18, 2018, 05:39:19 pm
Well, on a Mac it does use the MacOS raw renderer (hit Q to try it, if you have previews set to JPEG).

Apart from the pro level metadata manipulation features, at least on a Mac, it doesn’t use much juice. Although Lightroom power consumption has improved significantly in recent builds, preprocessing in Photo Mechanic gives you more Lightroom development time, than culling / labelling in Lightroom would.
Title: Re: Photo Mechanic and Lightroom
Post by: digitaldog on August 18, 2018, 06:54:14 pm
Also consider:
https://www.fastrawviewer.com (https://www.fastrawviewer.com)
Very fast, inexpensive ($19) and a raw Histogram.