Photo Mechanic Tutorial

[Prisc Chandola]

Professionalwedding photographers know that you can easily drown in work. Especially when overwhelmed with photo editing. Editing can be slow, mind-numbingly tedious, and tiresome. So finding efficiency in the photo editing process becomes paramount. Most of us use Adobe Lightroom to edit photos and house our photo library. However, the first step in editing is always culling images to find the best ones. This step can be done in Lightroom, but you can cull images faster with Photo Mechanic.

In the video tutorial below, I explain why Photo Mechanic is the better choice. I also take some time to cover my process to culling, some detail about how I capture weddings, and a little bit about how I shoot.

The real issue with culling images in Lightroom has everything to do with previews. When you capture a RAW photo, the camera will automatically create a JPEG preview and embed that preview inside the RAW photo. When that same RAW photo is imported into Lightroom, Lightroom throws the embedded preview away and creates a new one. Doing this extra step on 3000+ photos can really slow down the culling process.

Instead, you can cull images faster with Photo Mechanic. Photo Mechanic does not throw away the embedded preview. Instead, Photo Mechanic preserves the embedded so that you can get straight to culling. Opening a large library of photos becomes lightening fast. Once you cull the images down to a more reasonable number using Photo Mechanic, you can then bring the selects into Lightroom for editing.

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The main reason to use Photo Mechanic is for the speed it brings to a photographer's workflow. It doesn't correct or alter the look of your images; its purpose is to help you command an ever-growing image library. It's a powerful, fast photo browser for and file managing tool.

The good news is that Photo Mechanic isn't selfish. It doesn't want to own your entire library or swallow your files up into a database. You don't have to choose between Capture One and Photo Mechanic, or Lightroom and Photo Mechanic, for example; it Photo Mechanic complements nearly every other photo editor.

The most popular use for Photo Mechanic is file importing. Photo Mechanic calls the import an Ingest, and the process is extremely thourough. Photo Mechanic includes file management and organization workflows that other programs just don't match for speed, ease of use, and flexibility.

All of these settings can be a bit overwhelming, but they serve a useful purpose: organizing your images as they're imported, instead of creating a file organization nightmare. For a more detailed look at the metadata tools, including templating and variables, check out Daniel Sone's tutorial on image management with Photo Mechanic.

Some of the best photo editing apps lack the tools to properly manage an image library. Take ON1 Photo 10, for example. It's a fantastic app for effects and correction, but it leaves a lot to be desired for managing an image library. The same is true for tools like DxO OpticsPro, RawTherapee, and other otherwise very capable raw-processing suites.

Photo Mechanic bridges this gap perfectly. It loads previews fast, faster than any other program I've used. In high-pressure, quick turn around situations, this is a great advantage. Many photographers use Photo Mechanic as their photo manager, and an external app to correct and refine the look of an image.

When you have a large image collection, you have to use metadata to make sense of it. Adding some data like a star rating for our favorite images or a color label as a reminder is a great way to keep the keepers at your fingertips.

In contact sheet view, use the keyboard shortcuts to tag an image with a star rating or color label. Both of these metadata tags are easily visible on the image thumbnail. Now that we've added these flags to our images, let's filter for specific pieces of metadata.

The filtering controls for Photo Mechanic are in the lower right corner of the contact sheet view. Photo Mechanic's filters are based upon removing rules from the filter. All images are shown by default. Clicking on any of the metadata buttons will hide images that match the rule. For example, clicking on the blue color swatch will hide all images with a blue color label.

If you want to filter to show only specific metadata, hold alt on the keyboard and click on one of the swatches. This filters for a single, specific piece of metadata. If you held alt and clicked on a 4 star rating, only images with a 4 star rating would be left standing.

Then, you'll need to point Photo Mechanic to an external editor. Tick the box that says Assign, and then click on Choose. You can simply browse to the photo editor of your choice and select it.

Also, make sure and use the filtering tip from the section above to pinpoint the images you want to send to an external editor. Use Photo Mechanic to reduce your shoot to the finest images, and an external app to refine their look.

Photo Mechanic is a photo manager that many photographers are passionate about for its speed and batch features. In this tutorial, I've shown you some of the reasons that it's a mainstay in my workflow.

Keep learning about Photo Mechanic by checking out my tutorial for using it with Lightroom, or the Camera Bits YouTube channel. In this tutorial, I've also touched on Digital Asset Management fundamentals, which Tuts+ has defined as the "organizing, sorting, storing, and sharing digital images and video files." Learn more about managing an image library in this roundup post.

Most photographers who have any kind of success or social media following are selling tutorials about how to organize your photos. I think that is awesome! Wait, what? Isn't that exactly the opposite opinion from what this video is about? Nope! Okay, let me explain.

If you are successful at what you do, you deserve to be able to sell your hard earned knowledge to people who want to learn from you. I want to make that clear right away! I have purchased tutorials and videos from a number of photographers. Sometimes I actually learned what I was hoping to. Sometimes the method they taught was not something I would ever use. I purchased the video because I admired their work or because someone else recommended it. I'm not saying you shouldn't purchase lessons and tutorials. In my experience though, they won't all to be the revelation that you're hoping for.

Photo Mechanic works on a model of a photographic contact sheet. After opening Photo Mechanic, you are prompted to open a folder of images to work on. You can choose from the navigation menu presented or close the dialogue by pressing cancel and use the directory tree along the left-hand side.

As mentioned above, Photo Mechanic is primarily an image annotator. Once you annotate the images, you can move or copy them to their final destination. You can then catalog them with your choice of cataloging software, or ingest them into your enterprise Digital Asset Management (DAM) application. Then you will be able to search by keyword, caption, location, etc. The Find feature within Photo Mechanic is limited to searching the metadata only within the active contact sheet. The Find and Replace feature is more typically used to search and replace words or text strings. The Mac version taps into the underlying Spotlight search capability and uses this indexed information to perform systemwide searches within the Search and Quick Search features. For more detail, see the section in the left sub menu on Locating Photos.

Double-clicking any image thumbnail will open that image in a Preview window where you can see the entire frame, zoom in to a 1 : 1 view, compare it to others within the folder and much more. This tutorial focuses on entering metadata, so check out other tutorials, or view the Photo Mechanic User Manual for details about these other processes.

I have been to the Camerabits/Photomechanic forum and it appears as a user of that application the Affinity photofiles; afphoto cannot be read by Photomechanic which is a photo management application. Is there any update that permits me to review files stored as afphoto using Photomechanic?

thanks all!

Jan N

Hi First Defense, Stokeyh and mikerofoto, thanks for the feedback it's appreciated. FWIW initially I was a Light Room user along with PhotoShop. With my recent 'conversion' to a new enlightened path for photo management and editing I began with Camera bits. Initially I wasn't sure about this app but after a year I believe it's excellent and has been fast and accurate in all functions I require. Although I was initially reluctant I now I recommend it. Similarly I have been slowly moving over to Affinity from Photoshop and I'm now near the "tipping point". I've got Affinity set up as the default editor when using Camerabits/Photomechanic. It's very smooth between the two as long as I use other formats like jpg, png, tiff etc. for saving the file. However this means I have two files for each image a jpg and afphoto. I'd like to eliminate the intermediate step.

I'll drop a note to Kirk Baker at photomechanic and let him know how I'm using Affinity. Frankly there's been a lot of discussion on various forums regarding opting out of Adobe and Affinity is one solution I recommend.

It appears as though the workflow from Camera bits (Photomechanic 6) to Affinity photo is broken. I was reading this forum and Camera Bits and not sure how to get both parties to talk with each other so we can see our AF files in PM6.

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