Managing Your Workflow
Most photographers today have little difficulty with the physical act of taking photographs. However, when it comes to organizing, editing, and delivering those images, the waters begin to get a bit murky. For whatever reason, there are plenty of tutorials on taking photos, getting proper exposure, shooting with off-camera flashes, posing, stacking, Photoshop editing, and all of the ‘regular’ photography skills, but there is a lack of training on organizing your workflow before you get into the edit bay.
If you have ever found yourself wading through thousands of images from a wedding or other event, trying to find the few hundred that you want to use, then you will realize how important workflow is to the photographer. Even if you are a not a pro taking thousands of images, you can still benefit from properly organized workflow. Here are a few tips to help you manage your workflow to allow you more time in the field creating images.
Edit In Not Out
Imagine, if you will, that you have just finished shooting a wedding and you have around 1,000 photos through which to sort in order to find the 200 shots you want. Most people have the bad habit of going through the entire set and deleting the shots they do not want. This is an example of editing out. If, however, you were to go through the set, select the photos you do want to keep, and then move those photos to a separate file and delete the rest, it would actually take less time and effort. This is an example of editing In.
Sometimes the tools you use will help you in this initial process and at other times, they will hinder you. A great tool to have in your toolbox that will help you edit In and do basic RAW editing prior to moving to your editor is Adobe’s Lightroom. Once you download your photo files to your computer, Lightroom will find them and put them in its ‘library’. From this library, you will be able to select the photos you like and import them into a new file for further ‘tweaking’. This process saves a great deal of time, stress, and hassle.
RAW Editing Basics
Again, I will use Lightroom to help explain the proper order by which RAW editing should be done. Once practiced at this, it will only take you a few seconds per image to make the changes you need, thus allowing you to go through a large number of photos in no time at all.
When you look at Lightroom’s tool order, it gives you a good idea of a well thought out progression of image manipulation. This is the order of operation layout offered by Lightroom and should be the basic order by which we all do initial RAW manipulation.
- White balance (color temperature)
- Exposure (tonal range)
- Fill Light
- Blacks (Levels)
- Brightness
- Contrast
- Vibrancy
- Saturation
- Clarity
- Sharpness
There is a reason that these tools and actions are placed in this order. For example, if you were to boost saturation prior to changing white balance, when you did get around to white balance correction, you would have some very blown out images and even strange colors as a result of the saturation changes made.
If you practice to hone your in camera skills, you will have less and less to do in your RAW editor and the standard edit bay. That being said, almost everyone ‘tweaks’ images these days in order to make them pop. Typically, nearly everyone will change white balance, exposure, levels, brightness, and saturation to some degree before moving on to their standard editing application.
File Organization
For those of us who take a lot of pictures, it is imperative that we have an organized and logical file system in which to store (and hopefully find) the images we have created. Most programs, including Lightroom, like to create folders by dates imported. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, most people (especially photographers) are lucky to remember their family’s birthdays and other important dates, so trying to find a file based on the date it was imported into an application is like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles.
Whatever system you use, it should be logical and easy. Here is a format I would suggest you emulate if you do not already have a system in mind. For example, the main areas of your photography might be portrait, car, and corporate. Having sessions saved by year, category, and client is a good idea. For example:
2009
- – Portrait
- – Car
- – Corporate
2010
- – Portrait
- – Car
- – Corporate
2011
- – Portrait
- – - – Sally and John Doe
- – - – Mark and Shelia Smith
- – Car
- – - – 1957 Red Chevy Convertible
- – - – 1964 GTO
- – Corporate
- – - – ABC Lock and Key
- – - – EZ Sale Realty
- – - – Zebra Auto Detailing
Hopefully, these examples will help you understand the basics of file organization. With something like this, it should be easy to find the images for which you are looking. However, the organization does not stop here. Under each client, you should have a logical progression of files that will help you find the particular image as well as information pertaining to the shoot.
The basic file structure might be something like the following:
Client Name
——- Originals
——- PSD
——- TIFF
——- JPEG
——- WEB
——- Orders
——- Albums
——- Slideshows
Once you have this type of a system in set up, you should be able to easily organize your workflow and have ready access to all images and information you need when you need it. If clients want or need additional images, you will have record of those images and be able to send them off to the lab for printing in a matter of minutes.
The digital age of photography has caused many changes to come about, for some, not all of those changes have been easy. A properly organized and well-managed workflow will help keep things moving, reduce your stress levels, and save you precious time that could be better spent practicing the art you have come to know and love.
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