Workflow and me

Some people might question why a photographer might give away secrets like workflow but my response to that would be that I am someone who likes to pass knowledge on rather than keep it to myself.  Kind of like the film "Pay It Forward" I believe that ultmiately I will benefit by passing knoweldge on and make the photography world a better place.

First of all I have to point out that this is my workflow and this is what works for me.  It might not work for you but it might give you some pointers on developing your own workflow.

I am a Canon shooter but I don't use the Canon software; I useAdobe Lightroom for importing, cataloging and most of my aediting and adjustments.  Occassionaly I will use Adobe Photoshop for further editing that is beyond Lightroom.

So here's my general workflow:

1. I import the photographs


2. I mass keyword groups of photos that were from a particular shoot, occassion or outing.


3. I will now run though all the photos from the set and either flag a photo as a "pick" ([P] key in Lightroom)or "reject" ([X] key).  As a general rule I will flag any photo that is out of focas or badly composed as reject and mark any acceptable image as a pick.


4. I now apply a filter in lightroom to only show me the "pick" flagged photos.  I then move carefully through the filtered set and rate any image that I deem to be worthy of further work as a 1.


5. I then apply a further filter to show me all my 1 star images.  This is where I will now spend time on each image in the Develop module making small adjustmentsto each image and then making further larger adjustments (be it a crop or changng to black and white).


6. If I feel the need to take an dimage to Photoshop I will give the image a colour flag (i.e. Red).  After making the minor adjustments in Lightroom I will visit each Red image and export it to Photoshop.

This is a general outline of my workflow and rom time to time I may alter this for a specific project or photo set.