Workflow – no, not digging water ditches

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Upper Lundy Canyon
Upper Lundy Canyon

Final output of workflow

I’ve looked at workflow over the years.  Is it a fancy name for working on my photos to while away the time?  When I started getting serious about digital photography (and photography ,again returning to my passion).  I wanted to do in digital what I had done in the darkroom previously.   It would take about 2 hours per photo.  At 10,000 photos a year for a round number, there were not enough hours in a year.

Today it usually takes a couple of minutes and I am happier with the results.  What changed?

  • I got better with the tools (first photoshop, then lightroom)
  • I learned how to work with images in an efficient way
  • I learned how to recognize what needed to be done to a photo.

Workflow is a fancy name for the process with variations that reflects what works for the user.  This post is an introduction to workflow and the whys,  If you understand the whys, you can build your own workflow(s).

Below is my workflow with some of its variations; first the list then the discussion around each item.

  1. When taking photos, if it is not events or people type photos, I try and take bracketed photos.  My camera only takes 3 exposures in bracketing mode, so I get three; some of the newer cameras will take more automatically.  the image below is the normal exposure of the triplet

PL20091009-Fall-colors-Bodie-7952

  1. When taking photos that will be a panorama; I take a picture of my hand before and afterwards ad delimiters of what exposures are in the panorama.
  2. I Import the photos to my portable hyperscan disk.  This provides a copy in case anything happens, and it has happened !
  3. Import the exposures into lightroom with renaming and key words. (lots of stuff on this).
  4. As part of the import, I want to make sure that I have enable camera correction turned on.
  5. I use  a GPS tracker, Wintec 202 to capture GPS coordinates for events and landscape photos.  I typically will use Jeffrey Friedl’s geo encoder to transfer the info to the images.
  6. Usually kick off a Photomatix batch job to combine the multiple exposures into images.
  7. Sometimes kick off a PhotoAcute batch job to combine exposures
  8. Quick cull of really bad exposures or bad  Photomatix / PhotoAcute results.  This also acts as a chance to review the images and decide which ones I want to work on first.
  9. Sort the images, I use a rating of 1 typically to indicate that I want to work on a photo, rating of 2 when the photo has been processed.  This makes it easy for me to find images to work on.
  10. The workflow process here can take detour with building a panorama.  I usually build the panoramas from Photomatix output.   I usually use Photoshop, but for big or difficult ones I use PTGui.
  11. In Lightroom, work on the big things first that affect the whole.  Sometimes it exposure first sometimes cropping / rotation, more rarely it is color balance.  But, I do the global items first, and the most obvious before the less obvious.
    1. Cropping / straightening:  This is the number 1 thing to improve photos is cropping.  Try cropping and see what you can do to improve your photos.  In the photo above, it needs both cropping and straightening.
    2. Exposure: Often I find that the photos are slightly off; too light, too dark.  If a image needs a change it often results in a dramatically different feeling when you change the exposure.  Note that some photos are better because they are high key or low key (more exposed or less exposed).
    3. Color balance: If the colors are off try the exposure eye dropper in Lightroom (LR).
    4. I will remove spots if they are obvious.
  12. Next are the VIBRANCE and CLARITY settings for landscapes.  I typically play with these until it looks like I want it to look.  The picture below has been corrected for most things, though not all (can you figure out what, it is hard to see)
Upper Lundy Canyon
Upper Lundy Canyon
  1. If it is a people picture, I usually lighten the face(s) about half a stop, and or darken the background by half to a whole stop.  The idea is that the eye is drawn to the lighter spots on the images, make those the faces.
  2. At this point I am usually ready to print a proof (typically an 8″x11″) to examine the print.  The print will show up spots that are not obvious on the screen, and many other defects  that the screen tend to hide.
  3. I export to qImage for printing.  I have setup a LR export to qImage as a standard export operation.

At this point the processes diverge slightly; sometimes

  • I go straight from LR to Photoshop (which is what was done for this set of images)
  • I go to publishing on the web.
  • I go from small print to large print
  • I go from test print to photoshop
  • I do nothing (pic not as exciting as I had hoped)
  • I go back to LR for additional changes that I didn’t see until it was printed

Each of the above areas should be its own post…

If you are thinking that your images are going to end up on the web anyplace, you need to make sure that the photo is more than _IMG_7952;   This will never lead a search engine to your photo.  If on the other hand, you were to name it PJL20130508-Yosemite-waterfall-9876 you have a chance that a search engine will find the photo.  Moral: Make sure and name your photos on import it is much easier than doing it later.  The above naming scheme, are my initials, date (year,month,day), text, original sequence number.

Additionally, adding key words allows you to find the photo later with a search in LR.  I typically add key words that describes the setting, the subject, and the location.  Whenever possible, I suggest having more key words rather than less.

After the actual import, I also add geo locations to all the images using a LR plugin from Jeffery Friedl. http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies.  I actually use several of his plugins; he updates them regularly.

I use a set of LR plugins from  The TurningGate (TTG) for my personal website, PatrickLynchPhotography.com (PLP).  These are great plugins, although the learning curve is somewhat steep, although not as steep as Photoshop.

Panorama
Panorama

 

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