Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Photography Workflow, such as it is...

Other than for iPhone pictures (which come straight off the phone and get emailed to flickr directly), my workflow is pretty much the same for all of my pictures. When I get home I load the pictures onto my hard drive and import them into Lightroom, the photo management/editing software I use most.

From there I cull through the many photos I took (over 1,000 photos in one week for this vacation, similar for Italy). I "stack" similar pictures so that I only see the best one from that group when I'm flipping through casually. Then once I only have the best of what I've taken showing, I look through and find what pictures interest me, even a little. I give those a minimum rating of 2 stars. Then I filter to only the 2 star photos and start looking for the pictures that really stand out. Those get 3 stars and then I edit most of the 3 star pictures. Out of 100 pictures I might have 20 or 30 that I think are really worth anything, this is partially because I end up shooting the same thing 4 or 5 times usually, to make sure I have an exposure and, if it's people, expressions that I'm happy with. Then out of those 20 or 30 pictures There might be 5 or 10 that are real keepers. Those 5 or 10, out of 100, are the ones that I edit first and post to Flickr.

Typically, my "editing" in Lightroom is pretty simple. I adjust the color a bit. Typically I tweak the exposure using the various sliders to get a picture where the light areas are just short of clipping, and there are some areas in the photo that have a true black area in them, and then use the fill light and contrast to punch up any dull or dim areas. Then I go through and play with the vibrance/saturation until the picture has the right effect. The last thing that I typically do is to adjust noise reduction and sharpening. The kit lens I have (the 18-55mm) is not the sharpest in the world, plus I really need to do a better job of keeping it clean for the crispest possible photos. Other things I might occasionally do include removing spots from the photo if there was something on the lens or something small in the scene, like trash or something, that would be easy to remove, and I sometimes crop the picture to focus on something in the picture or adjust the framing if I was in a hurry when I took the photo. I'd rather just take the photo properly the first time though that crop, that way I still have the most pixels possible left.

I have my camera set to save in RAW format only. The very last step of the workflow, for the "chosen" photos, is to export them to jpeg and upload those jpegs to Flickr. Typical workflow for, say 100 photos, takes about 10 minutes to sort, maybe 30 minutes to edit, and about 15 minutes to upload and title in Flickr. So all told about 1 hour, average. This time may be more or less depending on how many good photos really came from the outing. On average though I'm happy if 1 in 10 is decent and 1 in 20 is really good.

Things I'm not doing right now that I REALLY should be doing include: automatic backup to a second hard drive in case something happens to the first. This is probably the BIGGEST thing that I'm NOT doing that I really NEED to be doing. Other than that, I'm not exporting everything to JPEG, which I could be doing to let Amon have a more manageable photo library that she can use in iPhoto, and I'm not using a camera/lens profile within Lightroom to help optimize my photos.

Something else that I don't really consider part of my "workflow" since i just started doing it with the photos from this West Coast vacation photos, and it's really more of an "effect" is HDR. For this I've only done the most basic HDR workflow. I imported the photos into Lightroom as described above. From there I can pick and compare a few photos that have been taken specifically with HDR in mind. When I'm out shooting, if there is a scene with VERY high contrast, like a dim room with windows in it or a forest with bright sunlight breaking through, then I will use a tripod to lock the camera down, and shoot several exposures. Ideally I will take an "average" shot and then a photo exposed for the shadows, and a photo exposed for the bright areas. Then once those pictures are in Lightroom I identify which ones I'm going to use and start up Photoshop. Within Photoshop I use the automate->merge to HDR option and select the files I've noted. I use Photoshop to merge the photos and decide how much contrast/exposure the final photo will have using the information from all the individual photos. This photo is then imported BACK into Lightroom where I do the final tweaking that I would do on any other photo, export to JPG, and upload to Flickr like normal.

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