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How to remove every out of focus photo from a photoshoot

It doesn’t seem to matter whether I am shooting kids or birds in flight I always seem to get those missed blurry photos. It happens. But now there is a really quick easy way to cull them and you don’t even have to be in the room! Introducing AfterShoot.

AfterShoot

AfterShoot is a fabulous program used to quickly and easily cull your images prior to editing in your program of choice. You can choose your level of filter coverage, from removing blurred photos and closed eyes to selecting duplicates.

Perhaps you want to be fairly lenient or quite strict in your selections — the choice is up to you. AfterShoot then gives you the option to double-check the final selections before sending them to Lightroom, Lightroom Classic or Capture One. You can also export to a folder.


Culling your photos

It’s pretty easy to get started too, just add a new album on the home screen and double click to open and review the files. They load super quick and you can jump in and start the cull.

When you select Start Culling you should see a new pop up screen appear. You can choose the level of culling — lenient, moderate or strict for various selections. I personally select strict on Blurred Photos.

If you click on the Advanced arrow, you can select additional filters, such as closed eye, blur and duplicate detection. If you go to Change Stars/Colors there are a few more choices, but mostly I leave them as is, but I do make blurred and closed eyes red and one star.


Review your cull

Now you just hit Start Culling. Walk away, let it do its thing. Go for a walk, read a book … have some quality YOU time. With the latest update to AfterShoot, the culling process is pretty quick. For a photoshoot of 103 images, it took me just 4 minutes, 4 seconds. You will receive an email when your photos are ready to review.

This is actually the beauty of AfterShoot — you can be doing something else while it’s culling. You get some of your life back. A standard shoot of say a wedding could literally save you hours of culling.

The other piece of advice is trust the cull. While that is easier said than done, but I have been using it for a while and rarely does it get things wrong. But you can quickly and easily make changes if you need to.

I ended up with 28 selected and 7 sneak peeks (what it thinks will rate really well on social media). But there was also 18 blurred photos and 18 closed eye photos. It also had the flash misfire and images where the kids are not looking at the camera as well.

So already that is 40 images I know I don’t need to review or even keep. Done, dusted, sorted. All I need to do now is bring the Selected final images into Lightroom for editing. It actually took much longer to write this article than to cull the entire shoot. What’s not to love?

Haven’t checked out AfterShoot yet? See what it can do for you and save 10% with the code PHOTOFOCUS10.