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Lightroom Workflow : Some people have asked me how I do my RAW file conversion.
I let you look into my kitchen!

When I go out for a typical photo-walk, I tend to shoot for 2-3 hours and may end up with about 200 RAW files.

At home all the post-processing and "digital negative development" is done with Adobe Lightroom (LR), and since LR 2.0 is released, there is hardly ever the need for me (!) to use Photoshop (PS) in parallel. To say it right away, I love Lightroom, probably more than anything else that is installed on my machine (and there is loads), but I won't go into this right now. Although this is a very subjective statement, there may be a lot of people out there who are able to objectively tell you why LR rocks.

So, here's the workflow I tend to follow:

First thing, import and convert on the fly the vendor specific RAW files into "quasi" standard DNGs files. Next, I force myself to bin (and I mean delete!) at least 3/4 of all the pictures. I feel there is no point in keeping mediocre images and clutter my photo library.

Then I start to develop one picture "roughly", hence adjust exposure, contrast (using curves) and brightness if necessary. Done with this picture, I tend to sychronise the develop setting to pictures that were shot under similar conditions (just hit the "sync" button and you're done). I keep doing this for the remaining pictures. The synchronisation helps a great deal to speed up. After maybe 3-5 minutes the 50 pictures are crudely developed. Now I tend to have another look over the pictures and bin again those that do not get my attention.

Now, after this rough tour, I start to look more closely at each individual picture, do the B&W conversion carefully and if necessary make a few local edits. Now with LR 2.0, the amazing thing is that for local edits I don't need PS any more and all is non-destructive, such as brighten the eye sockets, eyes or dark hair, slightly burn the background highlights or add a gentle vignette etc etc etc. Infinite possibilities. It just feels all so natural and it makes one feel like almost being back in the darkroom, developing the B&W prints, though it may not be as romantic and smelly (sorry folks) and most importantly, it is all non-destructive applied dynamically on top of the RAW data (unlike Aperture from Apple). Impressive job Adobe!

After development is done, you can keyword, sort, catalogue, print and upload to the web.

I have made a few screenshots to demonstrate the development process of one picture below, including the new and lovely local adjustments tool.

Lightroom Workflow

Camouflage Camera :

Camouflage Camera

Canon 5D ACR calibration :

Canon 5D ACR calibration

ISO1600 NoiseOlympus E-510 vs Canon 5D :

ISO1600 Noise
Olympus E-510 vs Canon 5D

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