My Lightroom workflow
Published Wed Feb 28 2018 09:42:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Photography
The steps
- Disable True Tone to avoid colour distortion
- Import photos
- Reject bad photos, and delete them from disk
- Rate
- Filter out unrated images
- Tag with keywords
- Camera profile
- Enable HDR if desired
- Reset SDR settings (clarity -100, shadows -50, highlights +50)
- Straighten/Crop
- Exposure/levels (HDR and non-HDR)
- White balance
- Colour calibration (has to be enabled in the ••• menu)
- Colour grading
- Masked adjustments (including eye enhancement)
- Adjust lens blur
- [Ensure changes are written to XMP before closing]
- Sharpen/DeNoise/Scale
- Photoshop adjustments (if necessary)
Final checks
Before I export a photo, I do a final check of the following things- Balance of colour channels and histogram
- Background brightness doesn't distract from the subject
- There's not too much contrast or saturation
- Colour is adding something. If it's not, convert to B&W
I rate in quite a rudimentary way. Anything with 1 or more stars will be processed further. Anything with 0 stars is filtered out from further processing/uploading (but kept for the future, just in case).
Keywords are just there to help find photos in the future — and are preserved when uploading to Flickr, which helps.
I use Topaz Labs software to enhance images at the end of the process, when I've finished working with all the RAW data and am almost ready to export the image.
Copyright
Most of my photos are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0.If you are unsure about your right to use them please contact me.