My workflow at socialphoto

My workflow

I’m not a professional photographer – I don’t have thousands of images to get through at a time, with tight deadlines for exacting clients. There’s just me and a couple of 4 gig cards (so, max around 500 RAW files from my 450D) that come with me on what I may call ‘shoots’, but in reality are just glorified walks…

That said, I don’t like having photos sitting around for a long time without me looking at them. If I come back from an event or a photowalk, I want to get photos onto the blog or to flickr as soon as I can – if anything, so I don’t forget. Anyway, here’s my digital workflow:

Shoot in RAW, for a start. Just makes life a whole lot easier when you’ve got a ton of storage to fill up. I mean, when you want to edit non-destructively. If you need convinving, go google about it.
Go take photos. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at my computer ready to work on photos I haven’t yet taken.
Import photos from card to computer – I used to do this via EOS Utility with the camera attached via USB, but this is painfully slow, so I bought a USB card reader and now use Canon’s Image Browser software. This now means I have an extra step here – once the import has finished, rename ’2009_05_22′ to ’090522-$Event’, but since I would always edit the folder name anyway to include the event, it’s no biggy.
Copy photos to external hard drive. Just because the 80GB hard drive in this laptop isn’t anywhere near big enough. Ideally, I’d copy to two – one to work from, and one to keep as a backup. But I only have one that’s big enough – my smaller hard drive I use as a disk for Time Machine backups, which will catch all the finished jpegs.
Import folder on external hard drive to Lightroom, rendering Standard previews and adding keywords in the import dialogue where appropriate. I say where appropriate – if I’ve been moving around a lot on a walk, adding ‘Regent’s Park’ to all photos may not be the ideal situation if only 10% were taken there.
Make sure the ‘Quick Collection’ is currently empty (if not, clear it) and work through adding shots to it where I feel there is some potential. I’m looking for shots that are obviously not focused badly (as opposed to artistically…), too over/underexposed and don’t feature evident camera shake. Potential means I may need to crop (dramatically or otherwise), change white balances, sort out contrast, convert to grayscale – the usual gamut of possible edits, basically. I am, however, only looking for things I can solve in Lightroom; I’m not a heavy/experienced Photoshop user. For truly awful shots, I’ll hit X and reject it from my library completely. (Every so often, I’ll look through all the rejected photos in my library. If there’s an ounce of potential, they’re saved. If not, they get deleted from the catalogue.)
Once I’m done, render 1:1 previews for photos in the quick collection. These are the ones that’ll need it.
Now, I’ll go through and make edits to most photos, unless I realise I don’t actually like it, and only hit B by accident, or to placate whoever was standing near me saying ‘Oh, that’s a really cool shot’. It wasn’t. On the other hand, if shots start to really shine for me, I’ll flag them. Once I’ve done with this initial pass, I’ll head back to grid view, and ⌘S all these edits to sidecar files, just in case I do want to edit the RAW in an external application – or, my Lightroom catalogue goes tits-up (along with backups of it) and I want to reimport with all the changes I’ve made.
By now I’ll have a good idea of what I do and don’t like. I’ll have another couple of looks through the quick collection, adding or removing flags as I see fit (there really is no science to this), until I have a selection of up to 20 shots, depending on how many I orginially imported. I really only want the top 10, so if it comes to it, I’ll start rating them with the 1-5 keys – except, at this stage it should really only be the 3-5 keys.
Finally, it’s time to export. I save photos to my laptop hard drive, in a folder of the same name. I normally use jpeg, with a longest edge of 1200 (unless this means upscaling, obviously), at 90 quality. When I’m exporting for prints, this becomes full resolution and 100 quality, obviously. File names follow the folder pattern – 090311-$Event-1234.jpg, where 1234 is the file number as generated by the camera.
If I’m uploading to Flickr, I’ll tell Lightroom to open these exported files directly in Flickr Uploadr, or if not then just in Finder so I can do as I please.