Hey again! One of my favorite things to share is how I use Lightroom on a daily basis. I spend a lot of time preaching on ideas, fundamentals, or Lightroom techniques, and I love it when I can actually help users put it all together.
Today, I’m doing some freelance work for a photographer on the West Coast who runs a phenomenal Senior portrait business. He’s outsourcing his editing to focus on photography and building his business, which I think is a phenomenal idea for a lot of photographers. (Just a note, I’ve substituted my own images for the sake of client confidentiality.)
Anyway, I’m working with between 50 and 60 of his images to help him get the images out the door to his client. Here’s the workflow I’ve designed for his images:
1) Import. Pretty straightforward – he sends me images via a shared Dropbox folder, and I grab them from the Dropbox and throw them into a Lightroom catalog.
2) He’s already handled culling (he only sends me images he wants me to edit) so I begin doing basic editing – adjusting crops, white balance, exposure, color, and contrast. Each photo calls for a different recipe to get it looking perfect.
3) Okay, this is where things get a bit trickier. After applying editing to each photo, it gets one of three color labels:
Red – Most photos get a red label because they require some retouching. This means teeth whitening, eye whitening, etc. I’m using the spot retouching tools in Lightroom to do this. I prefer to do all retouches at the same time, so I add the label and then get ready to work on them later.
Yellow – Photos that get a yellow label need to be sent to Photoshop for heavier work – cloning things out, cleaning up backgrounds, etc.
Green – Photos that are finished get a green label! I will either give it a green label right after basic edits, or change red/yellow to green once I’ve applied the retouches.
I use red photos for photos that require spot work in Lightroom, yellow labels for photos to be sent to Photoshop, and green labels are for finished images.
4) Export, email the photographer, and make sure that he is 100% pleased. 🙂
This three color system is really helping me to keep these things straight. I might use this system from now on, or maybe just for today. 😀 Lightroom gives us a framework to create things, and then we can design our own workflows that fit our needs.
Make sense? Any questions? How can I help you learn Lightroom today?