My current workflow

Part of the new course, Digital Photographic Practice, will be about developing a reliable work flow, a means of efficiently getting the image from the camera into the computer, processing it, outputting it to paper or the web, and finally archiving the files.  I thought it might be best to start out describing what I do now in anticipation of looking at ways I can make this better.

I have been using Lightroom now for some months and through regular practice and looking things up as I need to know them, an organic workflow has emerged that has so far proven efficient. I attended a LR workshop in early summer, at least three to four months after I started using Lightroom, and found my workflow is not so different from the one suggested. Of course, were I a professional processing thousands of images a week, my current set-up might prove inadequate. I haven't yet put it to that kind of test.


In anticipation of the work I will be doing in this course, I addressed my workflow in my final assignment in The Art of Photography. To briefly recap, I spent 10 days at an eye hospital in rural India shooting surgeries, clinics, and day-to-day hospital life. I have in my collection now 1100 photos. 150 of these have been exported for upload, print, or other forms of distribution. I don't recall now how many files may have been deleted, but if it were as many as those exported, then we're looking at about 10% of all images being usable.


Here is how I worked:

1. Create new metadata file and import images to Lightroom while simultaneously copying to laptop hard drive.
   
2. Review all images, flagging interesting ones, deleting the obviously unusable. At this stage I have only three ratings: good, delete, and everything else.
   
3. Flagged images adjusted for lens, crop, and tone.
   
4. Review flagged images to conceptualize a story, color coding those images usable for the story.
   
5. When necessary look for additional images that might best fit the needs of the story, adjust and color.
   
6. Export all usable story images to jpg into an export folder nested within the RAW folder.
   
7. Import jpgs to Scribus and allow the images to suggest a layout.
   
8. Once everything looks like it hangs together, begin the tight layout.
   
9. Add text to document.
   
10. Export finished layout to pdf/jpeg.
    
11. Once all revisions have been completed, move files from internal HD to external HD via Lightroom.
    

Let's see how this changes over the length of this course.