Michael Pino: Photography & Design

My Post-Processing Photo Workflow: Part One

This is a two part series on my post-processing workflow. The first part covers a long day of shooting an event. For me, this means that was out for a few hours taking photos. The second part covers what happens when I don’t get out to take my photos.

There are not going to be too many tips. As a matter of fact, anyone who reads this article is going to find a lot of things wrong with my post-processing style. But that only occurs when I spent my whole day taking photos.

So what is the first step? Stop photographing things. It seems pretty obvious, but you need to decide when you are done with the photographic process. But do not rush yourself, you will not gain anything by doing so. As Zack Arias said during his classes at Photoshop World,

“I’d rather get it right in camera, and save myself time in Photoshop.”

Those are good words to live by, so make sure that you are taking the best photos that you possibly can.

My next step is to get home and relax. I do not immediately start working on photos that I take for myself. If I was out for a long time, I want to relax, eat some food, and maybe drink some water. I’d rather start the editing process with a relaxed and calm state of mind rather than rush into the next step of my work. Now you might not agree with that, and that’s cool. Whatever works for you is great and you shouldn’t change that for anything.

After relaxing I will start to dump my photos from the memory card to the computer. This can take two minutes or two hours depending on the cards that I used and how many photos that I took. While my photographs are transferring to the computer, I take the time to remove all the batteries that I used (camera, flash, iPod, etc.) and charge them up. This is to ensure that they are ready for the next shoot. Don’t forget to replace the batteries after they have charged. There are multiple times where I have had to turn around and go back home to get a battery. That is never fun.

Once the photos have completed their transfer, its time for me to import them into Lightroom. This is a pretty quick, self explanatory step. You may have a different method, but for me Lightroom has a nice way to organize my files, and I can start to do some minor editing before bringing anything into Photoshop, if its even necessary.

If you did you shoot in jpeg, you can skip this next step. When working with RAW camera files in Lightroom, what you see on screen is rarely the image that you captured, and that is because the profiles that are used in the camera and in Lightroom. Luckily Adobe knew that, so they released the DNG editor along with Camera profiles. I suggest you download and install that package to your computer. My gripe about Lightroom is that it doesn’t set your photo to the setting your camera uses, for Canon that would be the different Picture Styles. So what you do is that you import one RAW image into Lightroom. Under the develop tab, scroll down to Calibration and select one of the profiles for your camera. Do not change any of the other settings yet. After changing the profile go to the menu bar and click on Develop. From the Develop drop down menu, select “Set Default Settings” You get a popup asking to confirm the settings for images from that camera. Clicking “Update” will change all of the RAW images from that camera to have the same Calibration profile. This will give you a base profile to work from, and you can change to to others if you are so inclined.

Once all of my photos have been imported its time to separate the good from the bad. This can be one of the more tedious processes, which is why I relax prior to starting my post-process procedure. In Lightroom, I set my Library for Previous Import. Then I filter the images based off of the unflagged attribute. I do this so that I go through every photo and leave nothing without a flag. Depending on the shoot, I will either go through the rejects one last time prior to deleting them. What do I look for in the keepers? I keep an eye out for a sharp photo, something with good composition, good subject matter, and if the right subject is in focus. When shooting a sporting event, the correct focus is above all others.

After I have chosen my Calibration setting, I go to the next most important setting: While Balance. This is the next setting that I change. I want to make sure that the balance of color is as close as it was when I was there taking the photo. Now you can always adjust the image to white balance that you like the best. Or it can be set based off of calibration before the shoot, going back to the Arias philosophy of getting it right in camera.

With the calibration set, I move on to the other settings in the Develop module: clarity, contrast, recovery for any blown out highlights, and exposure if needed. I’ll do some sharpening on the photos, making sure to use a nice high mask level—65 to 85 seems to work best for me. If I want to turn the photograph into a Black & White photo, I’ll import it into Photoshop, if not, its straight to the web or print from there.