Adobe Pro Photography Evangelist George Jardine is back in the podcast saddle, offering up image- and video-enhanced insights into the personalities behind Lightroom, as well as tips on using the tools themselves.

In podcast #34 (a 7-minute video tutorial), Geroge demonstrates Lightroom’s handy "Refine Photos" command.  Here’s a brief overview of the feature (not a prerequisite for watching, but maybe handy for reference):

Refine photos is a tool used during "editing" with pick and reject flags. Once you have gone through all your photos and marked some as picks and others as rejects, choosing the Refine Photos menu item does these three things:

• Sets all unflagged photos to Rejects
• Sets all Picks to unflagged
• Turns on unflagged and pick filters, so that rejects disappear
  from view

The idea is to help you narrow down an edit. Let’s say you’re looking for one good photo. Or 10. First go through your photos and mark the best shots (assuming there are more than 10). Then choose Refine Photos. This sets all the unflagged photos to reject status, and hides them using the filter. It also sets the photos flagged with the Pick flag back to unflagged…. so that you can repeat the process. Now go back through them again… and pick your best ones out of this "refined" group. Then choose Refine Photos again. Until you’re down to 10. Or whatever your target is.  This feature can work in conjunction with the "Delete Rejected Photos" command (Command-Delete)…. if you wish to actually remove the rejected photos from disk. 

In episode #35, George chats with Lightroom engineer Eric Scouten:

This podcast was recorded on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at Adobe offices in Seattle, WA. Eric sits down with George to have a conversation about Lightroom 1.0, improvements in 1.1, about Eric’s photography, and how his personal methods of photo organization have played a role in the development of Lightroom’s database strategy.

Both podcasts, as well as previous editions, are available via George’s iDisk.