Update

At the start of 2006, I posted about the workflow I was using for processing images. As you can imagine, it’s changed significantly over the last 18 months as tools like Lightroom, Aperture, Bridge and Photoshop CS3 have appeared. As folks still seem to look at the Workflow 2.0 post I wrote, I thought it was time to update with what I was currently doing.

Import, Review, Adjust and Correct

Once I get back with images on a bunch of Compact Flash cards, I copy the images into a “Dropbox” folder on my Mac. I then do a quick review on the images, deleting anything that’s obviously out of focus, duplicate or just not worth keeping.

To do the review, I use Bridge CS3. I select all the images in the Dropbox folder and fire up the Adobe Raw Convertor interface that Bridge offers. I’ve found that I’m happiest using ACR as a browser to skip through images - I have tried Lightroom for this job but I’m still faster in ACR (at the moment). I assign my standard profiles for the cameras that the images were taken with - I use Thomas Fors ACR Calibrator calibration scripts for Photoshop CS3 in order to get slightly better results from ACR. You have to be careful as I find the script output to tend to be a little “vibrant” for all conversions. Some manual tweaking usually gets me what I want.

Once the images have default profiles, I work my way through all of the images, setting color balance and basic image parameters (exposure, contrast, brightness, etc). The new processing features in the latest versions of ACR (recovery, fill-light, vibrance and clarity) have dramatically reduced the amount of processing I do in Photoshop for each image. When I’m finished with this phase of the workflow, most of the images are close enough to finished that I can often cut JPGs straight from them. That’s not something I could say with the older versions of ACR.

I also delete any obviously useless (out-of-focus, unintended motion blur, etc) photos at this point too.

When I’m done with the review, my Dropbox folder contains just the raw images that I want to keep. There are the basic set of images that’ll be archived and cataloged.

Convert To DNG

Once I’m happy, I save all the images out of ACR as DNG files. Because the previews in the DNG files reflect the new Camera Raw settings, they’re much closer to the eventual image. I got tired of looking at folders of raw images that had previews that were generated at the time of shooting. I’m much happier now that I’m using DNG files as my basic raw workhorse. The other advantage to DNG is that Lightroom picks up the ACR settings in them and does the right thing. I can tweak settings in Lightroom after the fact if I really want to. This is one of the reasons I started to look at migrating to Lightroom instead of Aperture.

Archive And Catalog

At the moment, I still use iView MediaPro as my principal tool for archiving my raw DNG and finished images. This will probably change as Microsoft acquired iView last year and MediaPro has become Microsoft Expression. I’ve got to say that I’ve been really underwhelmed by the change to Microsoft Expression so far. I’m still using MediaPro 3.1.3.

I have started running a parallel catalog with Lightroom 1.1 and I’ve been fairly happy with the results so far. The only roadblock for me converting to Lightroom as my main catalog tool is that it doesn’t have a script interface yet - something that I rely on for a lot of the heavy lifting in my workflow.

So, for the moment, I’m using MediaPro. Once I’ve finished importing images, I add the metadata. I use some custom Applescript Studio tools for setting basic information (such as standard copyrights and event dates) and try to automatically fill in as much location information for images as I can. I’m still fairly lazy about adding keywords to my images - something that I’ve found is actually a bit easier in Lightroom.

Photoshop

After importing, I usually browse the DNG catalog for the images I’m interested in working on. As the images are already color adjusted and the exposure has been set correctly, I don’t normally tweak much in the Camera Raw during the open (unless I spot something, such as CA in the corners that I didn’t pick up earlier).

The steps I normally follow in Photoshop are

• Noise reduction with Noise Ninja

  If the image is noisy (at say, above ISO 800), then I normally run it through Noise Ninja to remove the bulk of the noise. It’s very easy to overprocess the image and leave it looking completely false so a careful hand is needed here. I normally back the processing defaults off a fair bit and use the noise brush to keep areas of detail. The general aim here is to suppress color noise in large, smooth areas of an image.

• Input Sharpening with Smart Sharpen

  I use Smart Sharpen for pretty much all my input sharpening now. I do use PhotoKit Sharpener from PixelGenius for really tricky images where I want really selective sharpening but I’m comfortable enough with Smart Sharpen in CS3 to pretty much always get what I want from it.

• Shadow/Highlight

  I often apply just a small touch of Shadow/Highlight (around 2-3%) to an image just to recover some highlight or shadow detail. Again, this requires a careful touch as images very quickly look false. If I do bring up details like this, I often use a stronger contrast at the Curves Adjustment set to bring the image back into line. I’ve found that I don’t need to use Shadow/Highlight as much now that ACR has highlight recovery and fill-light options.

• Saturation adjustment with Velvia Vision

  I used to shoot on Velvia slide film almost exclusively and I do like saturated images. It’s the color in objects that draws me to them as subjects so I usually try to recapture the color in the image that I saw originally. Most digital cameras give a slightly flat response out of the box. I use Fred Miranda’s Velvia replicator to boost saturation just a little bit. I normally use the lowest settings I can (10%, for example), just to pull the greens and blues up a bit.

  For some subjects, like portraits and flower photography, I normally miss this step out as the images really don’t need the extra saturation bump.

• Curves Adjustment

  I also like a bit of contrast in my images so I have a set of contrast curves that I defined that apply a range of gentle S-curves to the image. These usually pull the contrast up and leave the image with a slightly punchier look. Again, this is similar to the effect that shooting on slide film gives.

Finally, I usually convert the image to 8 bit and save the file in my “finished” TIFF archive as a LZW compressed TIFF file.

Finished Archive

I maintain a finished archive of TIFF images in an iView MediaPro catalog. These images are complete except for the final output sharpening step. That way, I can use them for either web or print output without problems (as each of those outputs requires slightly different sharpening). I’m also keeping a shadow catalog of DNG and TIFF images in Lightroom (both sets of images are in the same catalog) so that I can work out whether it’s worth cutting over to Lightroom full time.

In order to keep the metadata in sync between my Raw and TIFF catalogs, I use MetaSync to synchronize the two catalogs. This means that I only need to edit the image annotations in one spot (the Raw catalog) which cuts the amount of work it takes to keep information consistent. I really try to keep these changes to a minimum tho’.

Web Export

For web work, I’ve started using Lightroom for generating web images. I export versions of the TIFF images from the shadow Lightroom catalog set to be 640 pixels on the longest edge. I also keep as much metadata with the images as possible.