Over the Weekend

I was busy over the weekend.  It was a great combination of create, think, think, and delete.
Works for me - and I learned a lot.
The overall issue is I have a number, between 100 and 150, pictures of high school kids and their horses at the MIHA that I think are fairly usable if someone like a parent would lower their 'photo' standards a bit.  And at this point, I'm not trying to make any $$$$s.  Yet.  You get what you pay for, eh?
I did some searching on how to automate Photoshop processing.  It's easy, although there are plenty of parameters to 'experiment' with.  Or miss and have to re-create.  The editing of actions will come later.  The nice part is the automation will also work the noise reduction and sharpening processes using my third party applications.  That's the good news.   In part, it is also the bad news.  Automation is automation.  That might work for some things, but even if I'm asking someone to take one of my creations - there is still a standard I have to maintain.  My initial batch of 130+ pictures didn't cut it.
Delete.  No issues, once I had the process down, the batch was less than 30 minutes.  And, I did learn a lot.
So what went wrong?  All the images are not the same.  I batched by ISOs as the main component was noise reduction.  That didn't work out so well.  Shadows in the wrong places.  The auto leveling did OK, but there were some misses.  And some images needed a little warming.
In the end, I wound up with a process that takes less than three minutes a picture.  I'm still not doing much, just the DeNoise, ACR Auto light levels and leveling.  Then slapping my name on it.  The longest part is waiting for the DeNoise to process.
The end product is much better.  I can do batches of 10 before I need to walk around.  I can probably find some efficiencies in there as well.  I created shortcuts to work folders and the final folder.  It's coming together.
One other issue I learned was a little noise is OK.  Again, there aren't perfect and I was jumping all over the place light-wise.  Some are considerably easier to work with.  Others will depend on what a parent will take for free.  
I mean really, I'm competing against a phone camera.
I also updated the firmware on the D500.  The D7200 did not require and update.  No lens update was necessary on either camera.  There is so much discussion on firmware updates on the forums.  I live in the word of firmware updates, so it is not a big deal.  In this case, I waited about six months after the release to do the update.  I'll let others do the testing.  I believe in staying relatively current.  Fall too far behind and you might lose the easy update path.  Off the soapbox.