2011 Lightroom workflow

Hey there people. Back then in june 2009, I had lots of people ask me about giving out a Lightroom post-processing workshop to accelerate their workflow and help them give a better render in their pictures. So with a stroke of inspiration, I wrote my whole photography style down to give back to a community that produced such strong friendships and inspirations to me.

Two years later, my photography has greatly improved to the point of being at quite a decent level of legend…. Wait for it… DARY. Still a lot of demand on a Lightroom tutorial of mine came to me, especially with the trend of shooting in raw and taking months to post-process. So I devised a way to effectively produce jaw-dropping images in the shortest time for everyone to just post those hard drive killing pictures and get rid of their RAWs as fast as they can.

So without further ado and with lots of love for you people who follow my photography, here’s my revised Lightroom processing article.

STEP 0 : the basics

• G : Library Grid
• E : Library Fast preview
• D : Develop interface
• N: Multiple pictures layout display
• 1-2-3-4-5 buttons: add stars
• R : Crop interface
• M: Gradient Mask
• K: Brush Mask
• V : toggle grayscale (black and white)
• Ctrl/CMD – Shift – S : Synchronize settings
• Ctrl/CMD – Shift – E : Export selected pictures

Post-processing
Regardless of people telling you they don’t do it (probably because they don’t have time or don’t know…), post-processing is mainly consists on applying corrections (exposure, color balance) to a picture to shape it in the ways we saw the picture when we first used the camera to shoot it. It’s an action that produces a picture. It happens either in the camera settings when it’s creating a digital picture file, at the lab when they are creating the negative, in the darkroom when you are printing a picture by enlarger or in a software like Lightroom today when you are post-processing a RAW file.

RAW vs. JPG
It’s not a question of being pro or being skilled or to the level of shooting raw, it’s a question of practicality. It’s necessary to shoot in RAW when it is available if you are planning to color balance or even correct exposure. The RAW file contains a lot of hidden exposure and color information (called dynamic range). They reveal themselves when called upon by the software (as in the software doesn’t have to virtually add extra information on the image as it is already there to display when the user makes a change). The JPG file has no such information and the software has to emulate and add additional information like some god ugly gray tones to an image by rendering post-processing a headache for the inexperienced ones.

Two types of noise : Chromatic vs. luminance
Chromatic is the color noise that appears in Red, Blue and Green dots in the grain of the image. Luminance is the graininess of the image.


STEP 1: Shooting for post-processing
In order to give yourself the best working platform for post-processing, you must change your exposure metering habits to meter for the best file rather than to meter for the photo to be viewable on the fly. Since each brand has it own ways to write a RAW file, I discovered through massive stress testing a way to shoot for the best file rather than shoot for the best photo.

Canon: +1EV at ALL TIMES
Modern Canon raws are really beautiful when shot well (especially using L level lenses). They are very contrasty, colorful and almost publish ready. When turned in black and white, they look naturally stunning. The only issue you will have with Canon is the level of post-processing you can do on them. Rarely have I seen a Canon user apply a lot of changes to his pictures before adding colors to them or turning them all to black and white. Canon highlights are very easily recoverable. The canon raw has also a lot of native contrast so it’s best to overexpose at least a stop to get a decent level of shadow detail as shadow recovery generate a lot of chromatic noise in the process.

Nikon: -1EV most of the times
Nikon raws are files of massive dynamic range that can really take a beating in Lightroom when shot well. Most the details in a Nikon lie in the shadows. Shadows will always be recoverable with little noise. Until the release of the Nikon D7000, Nikon cameras were never able manage overexposure well which made highlight recovery to near impossible. Save yourself the troubles by underexposing the picture to get a decent level of highlight detail.

Sony: -0.3EV to -0.7EV
Unlike what the Nikon users will tell you, Sony is sensor maker (its sensors power the best of the Nikon and Pentax dSLRs) that know how to get the best out of its sensor. For the same sensor, a Sony raw file will capture twice more exposure detail than any other equivalent camera by also weighting twice as heavy. I remember seeing how far superior the Sony A700 file quality is to that of a Nikon D300s. With Sony, you can recover both Highlights and Shadows. It’s probably the best file ever to work with until the Nikon D7000 came out.

Panasonic: as long as there is highlight detail.
Panasonic makes the noisiest files of all but also the most detailed ones. You will always get noise in a Panasonic raw file no matter what you do. Just make sure your highlights are complete.

STEP 2: Import pictures

1. Have a dedicated folder to store your “original pictures” and another folder to store your “processed pictures”.
2. When ready, just plug your camera. Lightroom will usually detect it and automatically classify the shots by date.
3. Be sure to “select copy to harddrive” and to specify the folder for “original pictures”
4. Select the date you wish to import. If you are not sure, check the box that prevents your from importing duplicates of shots you have in your harddrive.
5. Click import and wait

STEP 3: The staring process in Grid (G) and Preview mode (E)
This is what I usually do:

1. Render all the standard size preview with Library->Previews->Render standard size preview
2. Using preview mode (E), go through every picture and ask yourself if you REALLY like it and add 1 star to it.
3. Sort all pictures that had 1 star or more. If the number of image is still too much for you to handle, add a 2nd star. At this point, you might start seeing duplicates of pictures that you shot using continuous shooting.
4. Select multiple image (with either shift or ctrl/cmd pressed down) and press N to compare and remove images from the selection.
5. Sort all pictures that had 2 stars or more and look at the number of images to process.
6. Repeat 3 to 5 if needed.

After this, you will have a decent doable amount of images you want to keep and process. Failure to doing so generates:

• Duplicates of a same subject
• More work for you without knowing it’s more work
• Bigger album with less interesting images due to repetitiveness.

STEP 4: Develop mode
This is where the real magic happens.

Develop mode has many settings and sliders; here are some of the most important ones.

The Basic section

• White Balance and Tint: Manages the color balance of the image.
• Exposure: Manages the overall light of the image
• Recovery: Recovers highlights details
• Fill Light: Recovers shadow detail
• Blacks: Darkens the shadows of the picture
• Brightness: brightens the highlights of the picture
• Contrast: Manages the differences between the brightest and darkest parts of the picture.
• Clarity: Hardens or Softens the picture. Do not use Positive Clarity for beauty portraits
• Vibrance: Manages the intensity of the colors
• Saturation: Manages the presence of the colors

The Tone Curve section (best section evar)
Each slider of this section is pretty much self-explanatory and it’s pretty much the best section ever because it gives you so much more control on your image than the basic section.

Detail
This is where you’ll find NOISE REDUCTION!!! Use them wisely. If you reduce noise, you also reduce detail, so you must find the right balance.

• - Luminance takes care of the graininess
• - Color takes care of the chromatic noise

Camera Calibration
VERY VERY IMPORTANT SECTION for Canon and Nikon users. There is this option called PROFILE that lets Lightroom switch between different camera profiles of both brands. Some profiles have more or less contrast than the other, rendering post-processing much easier for the user. I usually leave it on adobe standard but when things get harder, I do this:

• Canon: put it to camera faithful for colors, camera landscape for black and white
• Nikon: put it to camera neutral, camera landscape for black and white

STEP 4a: My basic practice

1. Color balancing the image: Use white balance and tint to make sure there are no unrealistic colorcasts. Some cameras like to white balance to the blue side in daylight and the yellow side indoors. Add split toning for extra color correction.
2. Graying out the image: In Basic, put blacks to Zero. In Tone curve, bring up the Darks and Shadows.
3. Adding contrast to the image. Bring the exposure down still you see some highlight details. Use Lights to stretch contrast of the image. Use Shadows to dig in the blackness of the image.
4. Removing Noise: Remove color noise. Remove luminance noise.
5. Add exposure masks (will explain later probably when I come back from my trip) to selectively modify the exposures or color balance in the key points of the image. (M for gradient, K for brush)
6. Add another star

STEP 5: Synchronising settings.
If you have a stack of pictures that look alike, you can attribute them all the same setting so that you don’t have to redo the same process you did for the first picture of the gang.

1. Develop the first picture
2. While having the shift key pressed down, select the last picture of the batch in the film roll
3. And synchronize the settings (Ctrl – Shift – S)
4. Click the stuff that you want to be synchronized in the window that pops out and click OK

STEP 6: Exporting the pictures.

Almost done!

1. Sort pictures by the highest star grade (these are the ones you processed…)
2. Select all
3. Add Exif information like title, description, tags etc…
4. Export (Ctrl – Shift – E)
5. Select the “processed pictures” folder
6. Name the subfolder: year-month-date “title of the album”
7. Have JPG at Quality 100, sRGB, image resolution at 180 in the image parameter settings
8. Click OK and wait
9. When done, delete RAWs

EXTRA: Getting the right post-processing equipment
If your computer lags here’s what you can do:

• File->Optimize Catalog
• Keep a small catalog of images
• Max out your RAM.
• Buy a Solid State Drive for software and temporary working files. it usually goes for 2$/Gb so spend wisely (I had to go for a 160gb because my computer can only get an internal harddrive)
• Make sure your processor is 2.2Ghz at dual core.
• Get a future proof mac computer of the current year.

I guess that’s it for now. If anything, write me a comment below and I’ll consider adding it to the already beefy Lightroom processing article. For now I gotta pack for my trip to San Francisco!!!

Have a great end of summer!!