Having an effective digital workflow is a key element in digital photography. If you don’t manage the full life-cycle of your digital assets you’re asking for trouble. As your image inventory grows you are going to have issues finding work, and you run the risk of losing quality images and spending more time searching for images than creating new work.
One aspect of digital photography that I really enjoy is sharing notes with other photographers about their digital workflow, so I figured I would start off the conversation by letting you all in on my workflow. It’s a little thin in spots and probably could some improvement, but it works for me. So here it is,
1. Import images from the memory card.
2. Keyword the images.
3. Backup all RAW files to a portable USB hard drive.
4. Rate all images, and flag the duds.
5. Working from the top down in Lightroom I make any image-wide adjustments that I feel the image needs.
6. Adjust the white balance.
7. Adjust the Exposure, Recovery, Fill, and Blacks
8. Sometimes I will adjust the contrast.
9. Using the Tone Curve, I select strong contrast.
10. Boost up the Saturation if needed.
11. For any images that I want to post to either Flickr or my blog, I will export to Photoshop and perform the following.
12. Convert to the LAB colour space.
13. Adjust the A, B, and Lightness curves.
14. Convert back to RGB.
15. Create a touch-up layer and take care of anything that I find distracting.
16. Save as a TIFF and use this as a master file.
17. Re-size the image and save as JPEG for posting to Flickr and/or my blog.
I know that sounds like quite a bit, but I have it done to a science, and can blow through the steps pretty quickly now. When I first made the transition from film to digital photography, I would sit for hours on each individual item (it would drive my girlfriend crazy), but now I would like to think that I have matured somewhat and have fine-tuned my post-processing.
Watch for future articles where I will provide details on exactly what I do in each step.
Anyone else care to share their digital workflows with the community? Post them here or in the forums.
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