The reason I started this thread is because my photography (which I 'laughingly' call photo journalism - well what else is it?) involves taking two or three hundred shots and getting about a hundred of them up to an acceptable quality for a web site. My web site is very much a proofing medium from which friends order prints and three magazines draw images. As long as the web image looks acceptable I know always have time to 'fine tune' the chosen shots for further use. The poser was as to how I could do this in QU as quickly as Lightroom!

Someone suggested creating some web sized jpgs of the full shoot and using those frames to guide me as to which shots to junk and which to keep. As I have a copy of BreezeBrowser I'm using that. It is fast in displaying RAW's and I'm conversant with the assorted methods of tagging, the shortcuts, and so on.

Whilst I am culling my three hundred down to one hundred I let QU build its RAW caches on all three hundred. This is, to a degree I think, dead time in QU so I can usefully spend it with my BB and my culling. By the time I have finished in BB QU is fully cached and ready for action.

What I had not realised, after fiddling around with RAW refine, was just how reliable the RAWs were without tinkering with the nine rectangles and the assortment of ways of getting the selected rectangle to alter the whole image. I did around 95 images this morning and only one 'needed' some highlight recovery. I am not claiming the others could not be improved - but I'm looking for speed at this point.

I then created a filter that :-
Upped Contrast to 20
Added DFS 4 and 100
Auto-corrected Exposure
Shadow Noise - as I was shooting at around 1600 ASA (probably not needed normally)

I shall call this filter '1'

I ran this filter over all 95 files. The thumbnails all looked 'acceptable' so I took a flyer and created my set of 85% jpgs.

I looked at the jpgs in my Breeze and concluded that 13 shots really needed more work. I flagged them in BB and took my BB into a minimised screen so I could park it at the side of my widescreen monitor and work again in QU. About a third of the shots needed cropping (I had not bothered to take a second lens - lazy bones ). Most of the rest were dingy and needed plus ten of Brightness and a push from the left in the Levels box to get the blacks back. Now I know this works I can create a second filter for it and I'll call it filter '2'.

One shot needed work on the RAW and this was the one with blown highlights. I made all these changes, creating a second jpg after each change.

I went back into BB and made sure all the new jpgs with {Q} in front of them were 'good enough'. I deleted the first versions and used the batch renaming of BB to remove the {Q} suffixes - partly because the HTML browser creator in BB cannot deal with the { or }.

The two resultant folders are:-

http://www.tonygamble.org/Christmas_decorations_2012/index.htm
http://www.tonygamble.org/Family_Carols_2012/index.htm

Yes, they could be better - and yes, I'd love suggestions as to how to improve them. But I'm posting this message as I am spending quite a bit of time talking with LR using colleagues who 'need' a system that lets them process hundreds of images a day. I have to say, and congratulations to Mike, I was staggered at how effective QU is at getting highly useable images from RAW files with next to no operator intervention.

But any ideas of how I can get faster would be highly welcome.

Tony

Warm. Yes, but you know me. Err on the side of too much contrast and frightened to remove the warmth!

But, to heed your comment rather than challenge it, would you have found one image with a good clean grey spot to pipette on and then saved just that WB to every other RAW? Following my quest for speed I would not want to them indivually.

No prezzy from Santa - unless you count a tincture in the Club Bar! Not still in costume I hasten to add.

Tony

It depends on how you set it up. All it does is clip the histogram at each end which increases contrast and the amount of clipping is controlled by the user.
I think an experienced user is unlikely ever to use it.
Using noise reduction in a "catch-all" filter is bad news I think; this is used for the "exception rather than the rule". Getting your raw refine NR settings right should in many cases, sort noise before you get to the editor.
Terry

Here's an ON/OFF
with the filter

With the check in that box and the correct filter selected, it will be applied to every image.
To see that applied filter, you need a hi res image.... hover over the thumb and hit spacebar, or HQ in the page editor.

Fred

Tony,
Your DH-2 camera profile should be in the Profiles folder.
See snaps.
The easiest way to get there is through Qimage... see snaps.
Qimage will apply it automatically as long as you have Enable Custom Profiles checked. See snap.
To assure yourself that the profile is applied, simply hover over the thumb from a raw image for that camera, and read the HOTBAR below the thumbnail screen.
OK?
Let me know if you have it working.
Fred

The profiles that are supplied with a Qimage Ultimate download are camera specific for RAW files made for use in Qimage Ultimate.
I don't think someone else's will work in Raw mode.
You can apply any filter to JPG or TIF images in Qimage. 
Fred