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Workflow- Back from Botswana and Zimbabwe
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Nov 24, 2021 08:30:28   #
greymule Loc: Colorado
 
Curious to check my workflow before post processing recent 2000 exposures. I use photoshop. What is the best workflow?

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Nov 24, 2021 08:47:41   #
sb Loc: Florida's East Coast
 
I have never figured out a good workflow. I try to separate them into "Meh", "OK", and "Wow". Then a few weeks later go back through to make sure I didn't put one in an undeserving folder... The problem is - you have so many photos, and being familiar with your work, you will have a lot of good photos - so then what? I distilled my South Africa trip down to about 60 of my best photos and printed a book through Shutterfly. Sometimes people look at it....

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Nov 24, 2021 09:04:57   #
Tomfl101 Loc: Mount Airy, MD
 
Use Lightroom to edit first. Cull down the great from the good. Then go to develop mode and make adjustments. I would only use PS for layering when needed.

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Nov 24, 2021 09:06:00   #
Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States
 
My workflow is eclectic but simple.....

I usually only work on ones I'm going to use (usually posted in my gallery or Facebook), all, except the really bad ones, I keep as mementos. I don't work on everything.
That way I don't spend hours editing.
I tweak this and tweak that until I get it the way I like it, then save a copy.
I adjust any cropping/aspect ratio when I decide to make a print.

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Nov 24, 2021 09:06:57   #
dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida
 
Work flow... first drag and drop the ones that look good. I did not use the word "cull" since that says get rid of.
Second step, get rid of Photoshop!! go modern.
Third step, use Topaz deNoise on the batch

Forth step, Crop to the story picking 8x10 to fit standard print size... Then if you plan to take advantage of the 7 cent 4x6 use drug store prints to mail to Aunt Sally who believes that computers are the work of the devil... use a batch process to add 1" of the canvas so that the mindless machines will not crop to suit themselves.

Many will need adjustment of brightness and color etc after you crop them. Individual post processing...well, that is the time-consuming event. Yes if needed use Photoshop... but better to use versatile plug-in for processing with a modern edit program that you purchase for a reasonable price... vs the monthly randsome..

We all look forward to seeing your interesting ventures around the world.

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Nov 24, 2021 09:34:38   #
DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA
 
greymule wrote:
Curious to check my workflow before post processing recent 2000 exposures. I use photoshop. What is the best workflow?


My Lightroom workflow
https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/user-page?upnum=1584

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Nov 24, 2021 09:50:27   #
ecobin Loc: Paoli, PA
 
greymule wrote:
Curious to check my workflow before post processing recent 2000 exposures. I use photoshop. What is the best workflow?


I use FastRawViewer to cull my photos.

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Nov 24, 2021 10:14:20   #
frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.
 
sb wrote:
I have never figured out a good workflow. I try to separate them into "Meh", "OK", and "Wow". Then a few weeks later go back through to make sure I didn't put one in an undeserving folder... The problem is - you have so many photos, and being familiar with your work, you will have a lot of good photos - so then what? I distilled my South Africa trip down to about 60 of my best photos and printed a book through Shutterfly. Sometimes people look at it....


I use Lightroom. I go through them at 100% And flag the ones that need to be deleted ones that are good to go give them a five star or whatever the ones that need work I give them a different maybe a one star go back through delete the flag for deletion then sort on the one star or whatever you sort for the ones that need to be worked and work on those. Then go back through the rest of them and the ones you're going to print or whatever leave them as a five and change all the other ones to nothing or whatever you can also use color codes I've done that. The key is to call the bad ones and then separate the good as is from the ones that need work. The ones that I Mark for deletion would be any that's out of focus or for any reason I don't like it and won't use it even for a vacation photo. I'm kind of like longshadow the only work on the ones that I'm going to keep the rest of them are just there for my pleasure lack of vacation memory or something.

By the way, looking forward to some of these photos from your trip. 2000 photos will take a while good luck.

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Nov 24, 2021 10:35:16   #
greymule Loc: Colorado
 
Another question- when is the best time to use Topaz noise reduction? I just purchased Denise, sharpen and upsize from Topaz- all for $99.

Thanks for the replies. They all make perfect sense. My workflow has been

open in ps raw
make obvious adjustments
open in ps
make final adjustments, including reopening raw where I can.

Please feel free to correct me.

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Nov 24, 2021 10:38:06   #
Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States
 
greymule wrote:
Another question- when is the best time to use Topaz noise reduction? I just purchased Denise, sharpen and upsize from Topaz- all for $99.

Thanks for the replies. They all make perfect sense. My workflow has been

open in ps raw
make obvious adjustments
open in ps
make final adjustments, including reopening raw where I can.

Please feel free to correct me.

Correct you?
There is no ONE WAY to process...
Use the processing method that works best for you.
You may, however, decide to tweak it at some point in time.

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Nov 24, 2021 10:40:18   #
IDguy Loc: Idaho
 
Tomfl101 wrote:
Use Lightroom to edit first. Cull down the great from the good. Then go to develop mode and make adjustments. I would only use PS for layering when needed.


And now needed much less with Lightroom masking.

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Nov 24, 2021 11:07:32   #
Hip Coyote
 
After coming back from Africa I had about that many photos. I assure you that you do not have 2000 keepers, nor did I. Also, Photoshop will not help you cull any shots, which, to me is the first step in post processing. I do cull shots because, IMO, some deserve deletion. Some call it curating. Here is what I did:

I imported all photos from my cards onto my hard drive (portable SSD in my case.)

Because I typically make photo books (and in this case making a short slide presentation for my adult children I took) I want things in order of the itinerary to make uploads easy and in order. So, I took a look at the itinerary and create sub-folders such as 2021>Africa>RAW> 1 Victoria Falls and 2021>Africa>RAW>2 Zambia Village, etc. The numerals are to keep the folders in the order of the events as they occurred...in this case, we went to Vic Falls before visiting a Zambian Village. Hope this makes sense.

Once my pics are on my hard drive and organized into those folders, I go through the shots in Lightroom (or what ever program you have to do this) and decide which photos I am going to work on/keep. I use the "P" and "X" keys to select or deselect to Lightroom. If you use something else, such as FastRawViewer, then do it there. I do not erase the rejected photos at this point unless they are totally messed up...I just filter them out for now.

I then start working little by little on the sub-folders. If I can, I batch process many of the photos. I do that if they shots are not going to be the one's I would display or show as an example of my "artistic" work. "Auto" is a great place to start in Lightroom. If there are photos that I want to spend time on, then I do it then. Not every shot is a NatGeo shot, believe me. Lions sleeping on the ground are good for the photo book but not as a printed enlargement, IMO. One lion sleeping on the ground...not ten photos of the same lion sleeping on the ground!

Using my system, you then get through the day by day or event by event sub folders in an orderly fashion and not get bogged down in the morass of 2000 photos. You might only have 200 from Victoria Falls and cull that down to 15.

When I get done with all that, I create sub-folders under Africa, except this time they are processed....Africa>Processed>1 Victoria Falls. I export my processed JPEGS to those folders as appropriate and upload to what ever service I am using (Mixbook is my go-to publisher) from there as I see fit. When doing photo books, I only upload one sub-folder at a time, get that portion of the good done and move on from there...trying to deal with 200 uploaded photos is just too much.

This all sounds nice and orderly, but once in a while I see a shot that I know is a good one and go down a rabbit hole working on that, out of order, etc...but I try to stay organized. This is for fun, isn't it??

After all that, I delete the rejected photos. I often go back and delete even more if I can...there are keepers and there are good keepers. I also notice if I work and work on one shot, I tend to get quite a few tif files if I do Topaz and such...so I get rid of all but the raw and last one final tif.

With regard to post processing in Photoshop, can't help you. I use it as needed but use Lightroom for 90% of my processing. It seems PS might be a bit tedious to do a lot of shots. Others with more expertise (above) will advise.

It sounds like a lot, but I can create and arrange folders quite quickly. I do it up front and it takes maybe 2 minutes to do.

Hope this helps.

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Nov 24, 2021 11:16:26   #
via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP
 
greymule wrote:
Another question- when is the best time to use Topaz noise reduction? I just purchased Denise, sharpen and upsize from Topaz- all for $99.

Thanks for the replies. They all make perfect sense. My workflow has been

open in ps raw
make obvious adjustments
open in ps
make final adjustments, including reopening raw where I can.

Please feel free to correct me.


Use Topaz denoise first, as per the Topaz folks. I don't use the other two programs. I use LrC as my base program. I organize images into folders, run through all images to cull for missed shots, then go back through to mark the ones I really like with a green border. I only process the green marked images. I'll leave all other images if they are sharp and decent since I may go back to them at some later point. I process about 90% in LrC, use PS to delete stuff as needed. Denoise works great, play around with the settings to see how it works on various images.

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Nov 24, 2021 15:28:50   #
CamB Loc: Juneau, Alaska
 
greymule wrote:
Curious to check my workflow before post processing recent 2000 exposures. I use photoshop. What is the best workflow?


If you want to clean up your workflow before processing, which you should do, than stay away from Photoshop. That's not an organizing tool. I would create a temporary folder in Lightroom. (I would probably call it 'Vacation temp", or something like that) and have Lightroom put all the picture files there. Now this is important: as they are moving to that folder I would have Lightroom assign them some keywords, at the very least the date and your name for the vacation (Bot Zim 2021), but also any other keywords that all the files might share. Now you will always be able to find them easily. Next I would go through them quickly and delete all the garbage, out of focus, bad exposure, mistakes and accidents. While doing this I might assign some shots more keywords or mark those that look like winners with a color or a star. This makes them quick to find later. At some future time I might separate photos into other files depending on how you organize your shots, but no matter where you move your files to at this point you will always be able to pull them up as a group using your keywords.
This isn't the best workflow, there is no such thing, but this is mine. It is all based on Lightroom and Keywords. Just today I had to fill a photo request for "Night" shots, some with Northern Lights and some with the Moon. I typed in three keywords and was instantly looking at over one hundred shots from dozens of different folders that fell under that criteria. Only now was I ready to do some PP.
...Cam

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Nov 25, 2021 02:26:35   #
JD750 Loc: SoCal
 
greymule wrote:
Curious to check my workflow before post processing recent 2000 exposures. I use photoshop. What is the best workflow?


I’m sure when you get through 2000 images you will have it perfected! Then you can post here and tell everyone what is the best workflow!

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