Workflow

Workflow is defined as a sequence of connected steps.  It is a depiction of a sequence of operations usually associated with the post processing of a group of photographs.

In recent weeks I've heard several people both in and out of the club talk about the work associated with post processing.  It certainly can be a very time consuming thing to do especially if you come back from an event with hundreds of photographs.  Maybe there is a need to start talking about Workflow and any tools that help with post processing!

Last night while listening to a technical podcast I heard an interview with Chris Marquardt a photographer that works out of Germany.  He has a blog and podcast  that you might want to explore.  It is permanently linked to RESOURCE page under BLOGS and PODCASTS and it is named Tips from the Top Floor.  He has just returned from a month long trip to Nepal with over four thousand images, so Workflow is very much on his mind!

In the discussion he gave a brief and simple outline of what his workflow looks like and how he uses Adobe's Lightroom (and this would also apply to Apple's Aperture too) to create a workflow so he can quickly work with that many photographs. 

By using Lightroom ability to mark and rate photographs quickly and easily, he makes multiple passes through the group of photographs.  On the first pass he spends no more then 2 seconds per photograph looking for any that are obviously not worth working on.  He does not delete them but simply marks them for deletion.  These would be photographs that were out of focus, heavily and unintentionally blurred and those taken by accidentally hitting the shutter.  On his way back from Nepal he eliminated over two thousand of the shots in his first pass.

On the second pass he used Lightroom's ability to rate a photographs using it's Star System... they get rated on the 5 star scale as either a 1, 2 or 3 stars particularly while analyzing groups of similar photographs.  No processing or adjustments are made during these first couple of passes.

On his final pass he finally worries about enhancing his photographs or adjusting them if need be.  By setting up "Presets" even enhancements can be done on groups of photographs to help speed up this part of post processing.  Then the photographs are rated as 4 and 5, 5 obviously being the best of the best.

When previoiusly asked about Lightroom,  I would describe Lightroom (or Aperture) as organizational tools, a way of organizing and finding photographs and adjusting some aspects of the photographs themselves.  After listening to Chris I understand that Lightroom/Aperture are much more important then that and can greatly improve our ability to work with large numbers of photographs quickly and easily.  A way to quickly cull out the bad photographs and help the real keepers float to the top. 

If you are used to working with a heavily editing tool such as Photoshop, the focus of Lightroom is completely different.

Do you need to have Lightroom or Aperture? Absolutely not, especially if you are not working with large numbers of photographs!  Your workflow may use either more or less sophisticated software.  What matters is what works for you.

You can listen to Chris' discussion of this at his blog at this page.

Tom