Feb 9th 2012

I’ve been teaching degree students on the BA in Photography at one of the local Universities and one of the first lectures I gave them was on finding their own digital photography workflow.

It seemed important that, in order to see photoshop editing (being any and all image adjustments made prior to having a finished file ready to print or post on the web etc) in context it was necessary to see how it sat in the overall picture taking process.

So this got me thinking; what is my workflow?  What do I do from the moment I decide to capture an image through to having it ready to submit to my agencies, print, post on the web or decide it’s just a load of rubbish and send to the trash bin.

At first it seemed simple; just shoot, download, jiggle around in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), do some more fiddling in Photoshop (PS) and then save.  And I suppose in very simple terms that’s it.  But when I looked at it more closely and started to ask myself in what order I did things, what considerations did I make at the shooting stage in order to maximise the benefits of the digital editing stage, I realised it was a bit more involved than this and worth clarifying to ensure my workflow was as efficient as possible.

Now, I’m not saying that my way is the only way.  Certainly not.  Other photographer’s have listed their workflow and most books on photography include a chapter on it too.  I suppose what I can offer you in explaining my workflow is reasons and ideas on each stage to justify what I’m doing for you to consider whether they are something you could incorporate into yours.  This should be more useful than a didactic list of steps…

So, here, in all it’s glory is my photo workflow:

Now, that might seem simple, and it is I guess, but there’s a bit of detail to be added to better understand the order and what’s being done at each stage.

Let me start with the top box-New Material.  By this I mean new photographs, could be of anything-landscapes fashion, weddings etc.  The subject is not important but my camera settings are because this is the first decision we have to make on how our camera will record the data that we see as pictures.  If we get things wrong here I’m making a lot of work for myself later on and, at worst, potentially ruining a shot.

My standard camera settings, default choices if you like, at this stage are: set the camera to shoot RAW files (I leave this on default, for a detailed explanation on why RAW is a good idea click here), put the ISO as low as possible, use a tripod wherever possible, camera on autofocus, white balance fixed for daylight (about 5200K), put the camera in Aperture Priority mode and let the camera choose the shutter speed based on the partial metering system I select it to use.

But what’s this got to do with PS?  Well it’s about maximising the data in the RAW file with the settings on the camera in order to give yourself as much quality data to process later on.

The reason I want to capture as much digital ‘Information’ as possible and of the highest quality is so, when I start pulling it around in post production I don’t get horrible banding in my skies or other aberrations caused by processing a poor quality file.  The secret to ’quality’ RAW files his is to ‘expose to the right.’

By this I mean overexpose all your shots so that the brightest parts are just this side of being overexposed and pure whites.  You can easily check this on your histogram; if the graph ends nicely just inside the far right side you’re ok.  If it goes off the right you’ve blown details in the highlights and there is no data in them. This is bad, it will result in pure white spots in your prints so you have to be careful to expose accurately here and check the histogram after each shot.

My post on the benefits of RAW explains this in more detail but the reason this is good is because there is more quality data in brighter tones than dark ones so by exposing to the right, overexposing, we’re actually getting better data to process later on than ‘correctly exposed’ shots.

Now, having shot all these overexposed pictures we’re onto the next stage: download and edit.

I plug my memory card into my Mac, download the pictures on it to a folder on my external HD and then open the folder in Bridge, which is a software program for viewing and managing images.  You can use Lightroom, Aperture or other programs, whatever suits you.  The point is, now is the time to go through your files and edit out the duds.  I just give the ‘keepers’ a star with the rating system Bridge has and skip the duffs so I can delete them when I’m sure I won’t need them anymore-usually once I’ve processed all my keepers and am sick of the site of them all!

The keepers are then opened in ACR and I apply a basic processing pre set to all of them for lens correction, contrast, clarity, vibrance and saturation.  I then fly through each image making separate adjustments to each to suit their individual merits.  This is where that over exposing I did at the capture stage comes in.  Pulling exposures down in ACR to a correct exposure results in lovely even tones and a massive reduction in digital noise in the shadow areas.  Cranking exposures up (because the RAW was underexposed in the first place) results in increased noise and poorer tones.  Try underexposing something by 3 stops or so and lifting it up in ACR and you’ll see what I mean-it’s not just noise but colours look very poor too.  Even an over exposed shot can have dark shadows that are 2 or 3 stops darker ad it’s here that we want some tones that aren’t all noisy.

I then open the file in PS at 16 bit and apply any additional adjustment layers I feel are required to finish the shot off.  These vary from shot to shot; landscapes require various changes to contrast both globally to the whole image and locally to selected areas while portraits require skin retouching, the odd vignette and perhaps some cropping, to name but a few.  If you want to learn more about my PS techniques check out the Post Production Techniques category in my blog posts or come on a workshop.

Once the Photoshop fiddling is done, the image is assessed at 100% magnification for dust spots, saved as a TIF and maybe a PSD if there’s been lots of complicated layers I might want to return to later on and placed in a separate TIF folder from the RAWs.

I then go back into Bridge, add all the keywords required by the agencies and send the whole lot off to my editors before archiving the whole folder from this shoot in my own image library.  Adding keywords is useful for everyoe though because it embeds them into your photo file and means you can search your computer by keyword to find your images quickly. 

This screen grab shows the keywords box in Bridge, you put descriptive words that relate to the pic in here; 'Gazeebo', for example.

Anything I’m particularly pleased with will no doubt find it’s way onto the pages of this website and I will run various sharpening and resizing adjustments to optimise it for web output.  Apart from that I don’t sharpen my images until I know what output they are required for-web, print etc because it’s a destructive process and damages the pixels each time you do it.

You’ll notice in my diagram above that the penultimate stage is below a dotted line.  This is because it’s optional.  I don’t always do it but if I want to think about why a shot did or did not work I’ll assess it from both a technical and a creative perspective and hope to learn something for next time.

If like me, your earning a crust from your photography you’ll also need to take your batch of recently processed files and think about flogging them.  This is a whole subject in itself but it is the end game for me and without it all these pretty pictures are just that-pretty pictures but without any income off the back of them.  So I market my work to various picture buyers on a continual basis.

And that’s it-my workflow from digital capture to final output as a print or web image.