AfterShoot has to be one of my favorite new tools to use when getting started with my images. It lets me easily cull through them using AI, looking for things like closed eyes, duplicates, blurry images and more. Furthermore, it lets me manually cull down the selection even further if I want to.
In my experience, AfterShoot works best as a pre-processing tool. Meaning, you import straight into AfterShoot from your SD card, and then it saves those images to the hard drive where all your photos live. But what happens if you forget to do this step, and import into a tool like Lightroom Classic first?
Fear not, there’s an easy way to get your culling results into Lightroom Classic with ease.
First, customize your stars and colors in AfterShoot
Before you even get started bringing in your photos to AfterShoot, it’s important to be setup with the proper organization. For me, I’ve long used a series of color labels and star ratings to help organize my photos. By going into AfterShoot’s Preferences, and then to Stars & Colors, you can adjust what color labels are used.
For me, I take a minimalist approach when it comes to my workflow. Namely:
- Yellow color label: Select, needs editing
- Green color label: Editing complete
- Blue color label: Exported for the client
- Red color label: Original select, to be replaced by photo edited with third-party tool
- 5-stars: My “top 10” photos for a client to deliver right away
So in AfterShoot, I really only use the yellow color label, because that’s how I go about my editing in Lightroom Classic. The only other change I make is for the Sneak Peeks, I give it a 5-star rating in addition to the yellow color label.
My Duplicates, Blurred images and Closed Eyes images don’t get any color label at all.
I can then save this as a Custom Color Profile in AfterShoot, so I can easily switch back and forth between some of the other defaults down the road, if need be.
You also have the option to add keywords to each filter if you wish, but again, this isn’t something I’ve found necessary.
Then, it’s time to import and cull
Once you have your preferences set, create a new album in AfterShoot. Then, click Add a folder.
From here, browse to the location where your images are already imported into Lightroom Classic. Add the folder, and AfterShoot will immediately start importing it. You can click the Start Culling button, and it’ll start going through your images once it’s finished importing.
Once your photos have been culled by AfterShoot, you can manually go through them and cull more. You can add or remove color labels and stars. Over time, AfterShoot will learn from what you change within the application, meaning with each cull, it’ll get better and better.
Finally, sync your changes with Lightroom Classic
Usually after using AfterShoot, you’d export your images to Lightroom Classic. But because your images are already there, you can exit out of AfterShoot and go back into Lightroom Classic.
Browse to the folder that you’ve just culled through. You’ll likely see a bunch of exclamation points on your images, signifying that the metadata is out of date. You can fix this — and bring in your colors and stars — by selecting all of the images in Grid view (Cmd + A on Mac; Ctrl + A on PC) and going to Metadata > Read Metadata from Files.
Click the Read button on the dialogue that appears, and Lightroom Classic will sync with the colors and stars AfterShoot has added.
