How to speed up your workflow without crystal meth..... (Photo Mechanic Review)

   So it's only been a couple on months since I switched my workflow out completely and started using Lightroom instead of Aperture. I am just getting the hang of LR and my new way of working. So why would I want to screw my workflow up completely again? Quite simply: SPEED!

    When it comes to editing, faster is better. This isn't as important when I am working up a personal project and have no deadline, but when I am shooting event gigs, even if there is no specified deadline, speed is important. Getting the images up as soon as possible after an event is key, the longer it takes me to put images up following an event, the less traction those image sets get me, so I am always looking for ways to improve my turnaround time without sacrificing quality and attention to detail. Sure, it would be really fast just to post all the in camera JPEG conversions from a shoot, but that isn't my style. I want to at least present my best and do some workup even if there is a tight timeline.

    Lightroom and LR mobile was a step in the right direction, and a great timesaver because I could cull images on my iPad the next day at work while I was bored sick in meetings. But I kept hearing about this speed demon of a program that photojournalists swear by, and even got a great word from Joe McNally; Photo Mechanic. 

   Photo Mechanic isn't an image editor, it's an image sorter and image culler. This quick review won't even touch a portion of the capabilities resident in this freaking awesome too. So, what the hell is it? Quite simply it's the fastest, most useful import and sorting tool I have ever seen. And I have only used the free trial version so far.

   Basically, Photo Mechanic destroys any other image handling program I have seen when it comes to importing, sorting, categorizing and adding meta data to your image files. Shot five cards worth of images? No problem, PM can ingest (what it calls the import function) as many cards simultaneously as you have card readers.

   Meta Data control is simply unbelievable. Yeah, most programs like LR or aperture let you set up IPTC presets to apply on import, just like PM. But photomechanical ads variables. You can build a presets that let you automatically build dynamically changing captions, titles, file names.... etc. You can even build cheat sheets for your captions so that you can use shortcuts to make your captions specific to each image.

    Even if you aren't a photojournalist with a tight deadline, Photo Mechanic still offers the advantage of speed. Unless you build full resolution previews of all your images on import, either LR or Aperture can still be slow as hell to work with when you just want to view your images and go through them quickly for culling. Even if you have a really fast processor and lots of RAM, if you are shooting with a high resolution sensor (heaven forbid the D800 and its' 36mp 14 bit raw files) you will be waiting forever each time you scroll forward and the preview has to render. It isn't a long wait for each file, but it adds up, and is really frustrating when you are in a hurry and trying to get an image set edited fast.

   Rumor had it that Photo Mechanic eliminated this issue. It uses the built in JPEG preview contained within the raw file and lets you blast through the culling process. Or so they say. Camera Bits (who makes PM) offers a 30 day free trial, so I decided to see how PM could work for me. I was pretty skeptical, since LR mobile was already shortening my workflow significantly.

   Downloaded and installed the trial, and got set to test it out. I was initially not that impressed. Turns out this was my fault. When I do my imports into LR, I convert my raw files into DNGs. For my initial tests of PhotoMechanic I was using it to work on folders of already imported/converted images.

   This was a mistake. Photo Mechanic does not seem to play well with DNGs. When I tried to go through a contact sheet (PM's term for a folder full of images, throwback to old school negative editing days) of DNGs, it was horribly slow to render images, and if I attempted to change any meta data, PM would lock up and pretty much die. So I was initially underwhelmed, to say the least. But everyone was talking about how fast it was... figured I had to be missing something. And I was.

   My next shoot, instead on importing images using LR and converting to DNG, I just copied the .nef files directly from my camera card to a holding folder on my drive, then used PM to go through those files. DAMN! This was what everyone was talking about. PM ate the nef files like they were candy and would respond almost faster than I could click the scrolling arrows or change any meta data settings. Just to double check, I then took the culled image set and imported them to LR and converted them to DNGs and then re-opened them in PM... and found that the same slowdown and crash happened.

  I am not a coder, not sure what is going on under the hood, but my theory is that when LR converts a raw file into a DNG, it either throws out the built in jpeg preview that PM runs on, or puts in into a format that PM can't recognize, this preventing Photo Mechanic from being able to speed render and work with those files.

   So- here is my new workflow. When I am done with a shoot, I do the initial import using Photo Mechanic's Ingest function. I take advantage of the meta data functionality in PM, which seems to me light years ahead of what I can do in LR. I then cull the images and make my initial selections and put them into a sub folder all within PM. Last thing is that I crop all the images in PM- it is light years faster and easier than in LR. Once I have done all the initial bulk work in PM, I go into LR and run an import/convert to DNG on just the files that survived the initial cull. Once this set is imported into LR, I take the rejects and toss them onto a scratch drive, just in case. As that drive fills up the oldest rejects will get deleted completely. I figure if no one has asked for them by then, they never will. Then I proceed to edit the survivors using my normal LR and Photoshop workflow.

   You would think that adding an additional layer of software and basically doing a double import would add time to the workflow, but it actually creates a significant time savings. The closest equivalent example I can make is the difference between using just PhotoShop or adding Lightroom to PS in your workflow. Before LR, you had to convert each images from raw to another format, then open each image in PS one at a time and do all your edits, then move on to the next image. Adding LR let you look at multiple images simultaneously, do basic editing a hell of a lot faster, and even apply batch settings to a group of images.

   Photo Mechanic does add another layer, but just like batch adjusting exposure or WB in LR is faster than doing it individually to each image in PS, Photo Mechanic lets you caption, rate, select and crop images significantly faster, easier and more powerfully than LR does.

   For a personal shoot with a model where I may only wind up with a couple hundred images and no particular timeline to get them edited and shipped out, I may skip the photomechanic step and just use LR. But for a conference like I shot this week where I wound up with 1400 images to sort through, caption, cull, edit and post I definitely appreciate the speed and power Photo Mechanic offers. It helps me win the speed race and get quality images back to the clients as fast as possible; fast enough that the event is still fresh in the minds of the audience, and my high quality, well edited and curated images can actually get out and posted in time to compete head to head with the crappy cell phone shots that were on Facebook and instagram 30 seconds after the event. And that may just prove to be worth its' wait in gold.

    Even if nothing else, not having to wait on the dan skinny beach ball is worth the price of admission. If you have all the time in the world to edit and deliver images from your shoots, save the $150 and don't pick up Photo Mechanic. But if you are shooting lots of images and operating on deadlines, or just appreciate every second you can spend playing with your family instead of waiting on images to load so you can get through the aftermath of a shoot, then photo mechanic will prove to be well worth what you spend on because you will get back the only thing in life you can never get more of- TIME. It's the only thing that matters, and photo mechanic lets you use yours more efficiently. If you're not sure if it will help you or not, they give you a month free to try it out, so you may as well give it a shot. I did, and there's no going back. It's awesome!

UPDATE: The people at Camera Bits (who make Photomechanic) apparently read this review. They have reached out to me and said PM should not be any slower with the DNG files than it is with the NEF version. I just sent them a couple of sets of files and all my system info, so maybe my issue with the dngs will get resolved, but even if not I am really impressed with their customer service and dedication to their product.

UPDATE 2: Camera bits took a look at my files and sent me an answer. Turns out I was close to correct in my theory. My DNG files did not have the embedded jpeg preview that PM uses. But this was because I had lightroom set to not built and include jpeg previews into my DNG files. I changed that setting, did a test conversion with the previews embedded, and PM eats those and spits them out just as fast as the unconverted raw files. So, awesome program and beyond stellar customer service and support. Definitely worth the money for both time saved and user experience.