Country's Mama Loc: Michigan

I do the same unless there might be a reason down the road that I would need it cropped to different dimensions. Say I want to make a card and a framed print from the same photo. Then I crop last and save the uncropped version for later possible cropping.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

What I find difficult is dealing with large numbers of images - 100 or more raw. Organizing is a hassle.

raden Loc: Nettleton MS

Thanks everybody! It's extremely helpful and informative to be able to come here and to hear all of your techniques, methods, thoughts and ideas. It's very much appreciated.

Martys Loc: Lubec, Maine

As you really learn the ins and outs and get to understand each of the post processing tools that you use,..... you will start to use them with a more deliberate understanding,....for your own personal particular liking and application,....no matter how many workflow techniques you read, try or are told are best.

Processing a single image can be much like a chess game,....you'll never do it absolutely identically two times in a row,...close but not identical.

Many different approaches can deliver many perfectly excellent results.

Marty

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

best advice everyone has their own workflow that works for them

DaveMM Loc: Port Elizabeth, South Africa

Quite a lot of people say crop first - why work on a section of photo that you will later discard? The other reason for crop-first only matters if you have a slow computer, as there is less for the computer to recalculate.

hfb46 Loc: UK

I don't understand the benefit of creating a TIFF file to work on. Could you explain why this is better than working on the RAW file please?

charryl Loc: New Mexico, USA

My short workflow working with raw files in photoshop. I always save as a PS file (sometimes several versions) until final master:

White balance adjustment if needed.
Selective adjustments using curves
Selective sharpening if needed
Cropping if needed

jimni2001 Loc: Sierra Vista, Arizona, USA

If I am going to crop I do it first in most cases. Then do my white balance and color adjustments. That way the part of the photo I have discarded does not affect the color adjustments I do on the part of the photo I want to use. I use the histogram a lot when doing any color adjustments and there can be a big difference to the histogram between precrop and postcrop. If I have any touch-up to do with the clone stamp or healing brush or any thing like that I do it before I do any color adjustments. If I have noise reduction to do I will do it prior to any color enhancement too. I also sharpen as the very last step.

Annie_Girl Loc: It's none of your business

My workflow pretty much stays the same everytime I edit. There are some small changes (depending on the over all picture) but for the most part it goes like this:

I shot raw, 100% of the time (I’m too lazy to go into the menu and change it so I just leave it alone).

Import into LR, don’t use any presets on importing.

Round 1 of culling, remove any blurry, missed focus, funny/odd facial expression shots.

Round 2 of culling, batch like images/poses and rank 1 to 5.

Filter images ranked 5 (how many do I have? Over 30 I’m good, under 30 I bring in the images ranked 4 and see if I am missing any poses).

Adjust white balance, color and exposure using my colorchecker passport.

Export into CS5 for editing as a TIFF

Clean up image, removed unwanted spots/wrinkles etc from background and foreground.

Clean up skin and smooth skin

Adjust skin tone if needed (hardly ever needed now that I use the colorchecker)

Liquify tool to remove bumps, puckers and unwanted body issues and enhance other parts of the body.

Correct any issues with image caused by the pulling and pushing with liquify.

Levels, curves and hue saturation layers.

Save image as a PSD (all layers open and showing)

Flatten. Resize to 900px on the long side and 72 dpi and sharpen

Save as Jpeg in a file for client viewing.

* Cropping doesn’t happen print order is received. Then the image is cropped for the size of print requested.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

Very useful information but remember, it is for Photoshop 6 and 7 users. I'm sure that CS users can learn from it, but CS will no doubt have better and faster ways to do things now.

CaptainC Loc: Colorado, south of Denver

I would never crop first except to eliminate something. How do you know later on you do not want a different crop? I do as much as possible in the raw converter: exposure, white balance, any targeted color and exposure adjustments, initial noise reduction if needed...anything that ACR will allow that is needed.

Then to CS6 for everything else. Saved as a TIFF with layers (PSD may not be supported in the future, so no PSD files.)

Then this file is saved as the master. A duplicate is then cropped to whatever I want/need but that master is there for future crops.THEN sharpen for printing/display.

charryl Loc: New Mexico, USA

Exactly. You just say it more eloquently than I do. :thumbup:

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

This is actually a good question which is refreshing after several dozen "What camera should I buy?" and "What lens should I buy today to shoot my daughter's wedding for free this weekend?" threads.

If you do your cropping in LR3 on the RAW file and keep the RAW file on your hard drive, the crop is non-destructive and reversible when you decide you need a different crop in the future. In that case you can crop first and other editing next - or other editing first and crop last - it doesn't matter what order they are in. No matter what format you convert your final product to, the editing and cropping are done but they are still reversible by going back to the RAW file, altering anything and converting to whatever format again.

If your method is to convert to TIFF and dump your large RAW files to save space, I'd edit and save the original full-size TIFF first and later create a cropped TIFF under a different name with the crop size in the name because TIFF cropping is NOT reversible. In that case, I'd do editing to the RAW file before converting to TIFF and only crop the original TIFF conversion if I were going to save the cropped version under a different name.

It's my view that one should always keep an original file, whether RAW or TIFF, in maximum resolution because you never know what you might want to do with it later. There are people who crop down to very low resolution because they don't plan (short term thinking) on printing Aunt Mabel any larger than 4X6 or showing her on a computer monitor as an attachment on an e-mail. But then Aunt Mabel dies and they'd like to make a high quality 11X14 of her for Uncle Joe's living room wall and have great difficulty getting even mediocre quality or give up trying.

Personally, I do all editing such as white balance, exposure, saturation/vibrance, highlights, clarity, and lens vignetting compensation first in LR4. Then I adjust distortion and vertical. If there is minor cropping to do, such as cutting a garbage can out of the left bottom corner, or trimming a utility pole off the left side, or getting rid of too much surroundings because I composed badly, that are not artistic crops but just mechanical improvements of the shot, I'll do them at this point.

If I choose to go to a plug-in, the plug-in will always convert RAW to TIFF to work on the shot and that's the end of my reversible RAW editing. That's why I did the minor "cleanup" cropping already. When I come back to LR4 from the plug-in, I make sure I'm working on the TIFF version and use luminance and color noise reduction. After the noise reduction I do some sharpening to taste.

To use the edited TIFF files, they must also be re-saved again to TIFF or JPG or whatever because the noise reduction and sharpening won't be seen by whatever other software you might want to send the file to.

Most times I'll send my finalized TIFFs to PaintShop Pro X5 to resize the number of pixels to what I need, touch up flaws like dead grass spots in the yard that can be colored in with a minor green tint using the paint brush tool, etc. If I were going to do something artistic, this is where it would be best accomplished - not in LR4.

Then if I'm going to create JPGs for the project, which I do in my work because I can only send them JPGs that are less than 2MB in size, I convert to JPG in PSPX5 because it has an "optimize" button that reduces the file size considerably without losing visible quality. It shows me a zoomed sample of what the final file will look like and calculates the resulting file size as I adjust the optimization. This function compresses in a different way than normal JPG compression and allows me to send a 3200X2130 pixel file that is 1.2MB file instead of a 1.9MB file but they look identical. I don't have any other software with that "optimization" feature so my TIFF to JPG conversions are always in PSPX5 as well as the final touchups.

Hope any of that helps answer your question.

RMM Loc: Suburban New York

Do a Search (see the top of the page) on "Workflow." This was discussed at length some time back, and there were some excellent and detailed recommendations.