Lightroom Workflow Advice

[Phil]

Not much I can add to the above LR workflow suggestions except as a final sanity check after saving as .JPG I run the

"Alamy SizeCheck" program to double check all candidates for image size, color profile, etc. prior to uploading to Alamy.

[spacecadet]

That advice isn't harmful, but neither size nor colour profile will cause a QC fail.

[Moorstuff etc]

THank you all

[Marianne]

Have you tried the Nik Silver Effex filter for B&W? It provides you with beautiful images that look like they came out of a traditional darkroom - I don't upload much B&W to Alamy - mostly for gallery shows and POD sites but the ones I've uploaded to Alamy have never had a fail. I find the B&W conversions in LR and CC are nowhere near as authentic looking and in Silver Effex you can control the grain and so many other factors. 

 

Does anyone sell much B&W on Alamy? 

 

I love that with the newer versions you can now use the Nik filters - and other filters in both LR and PS. I often will use different filters right from LR and then open the various versions as layers in PS to tweak them. Doing as much as I can in LR speeds up my workflow considerably. 

 

I use a combination of stars and colors for various things, as well as the flags. Colors tell me where I want to upload - one star is for photos I'm thinking about keeping - two for photos that need to be combined with others for panoramas of focus stacking with three stars for the base photo - I'll make those all yellow so I know what goes together. I use 4 and 5 stars for the heroes - those I plan to process and upload first. I've gotten much better about using the reject flag and it's so nice to "Sort by picks" after going through 300-400 photos I've shot in one day to delete those that are not worthwhile. In the past two years I've organized 60,000 photos taken between 2006-2015 into one giant LR catalog and I can't imagine keeping track of my images without it. 

 

Collections are great too. I'm working on collections to keep track of all my stock photo uploads for each site I submit to - since I have many years of work to organize that way, it's not done. I also make small temporary collections for shows, clients, various types of submissions to different publishers - e.g. I submit a large quantity of photos to various calendar companies once a year so it's a great way to organize those photos as I go along during the year - Collections are a great way to prevent unnecessary duplicates. 

[David Hewison]

I'm jumping in late but there's some comments here from people much more experienced than me that puzzles me. 

 

For me I use the following LR workflow:

 

1. Import raw images into LR.  I don't apply presents because I haven't gotten around to setting them up yet. One day I will! 

2. Rate the images.

3. Edit selected images in Develop module

4. If PS editing is required, I right click and select edit in PS,  then save the finished file.. PS edited file is automatically added to LR catalog with same filename and the word 'edit' applied to it. <-- why do others export to tiff then edit in PS? Seems like a very round about way to go about it. 

5. Title, describe, keyword and export as jpg using alamy presets.

6. colour code images that are uploaded to Stock agencies. 

 

LR looks after the whole process.  Other than old habits, which I understand, why wouldn't one use LR to it's full potential?

[Bill Kuta]

 

LR looks after the whole process.  Other than old habits, which I understand, why wouldn't one use LR to it's full potential?

 

And as I've said, I haven't inspected an entire image at 100% ever since LR added the "Visualize Spots" feature to the Spot Removal tool. Just hit "Visualize Spots", crank up the contrast, and the dust specks pop right out in a full-image view. Better and more reliable than my old eyes.

[David Hewison]

That's an awesome feature, I agree.. Actually i recently bought an ef 24-105 f4L and to have a bit of a play, I took some shots of Jelly Babies doing stupid things and it was that feature in lightroom that showed up a manufacturing fault - one of the elements had an air bubble in it!    I got a refund, so I'm happy. 

 

Do you still view at 100% to check focus?

[Bill Kuta]

 

Do you still view at 100% to check focus?

 

Of course, but that's just a quick first step. Trying to find dust specks (one of the last steps) just by coursing over the whole image at 100% was agonizing for many years, and got more so, the older I and my eyes got. The LR "Visualize Spots" works for me.

 

I use LR6 for all of my post-processing for stock, except that first I still use Canon Zoombrowser (old habit) to decide which images are going into LR. Then they get winnowed down further in various steps in LR.

[David Hewison]

OK that makes sense.. similar to me then - except LR6 looks after 100% of workflow - but I'm fairly new, and started this way.. so no old habits!  

[MDM]

Try taking a shot of a blue sky with a lens stopped down as low as it will go - f22 is good, f32 even better. And take a series of shots right out to f5.6. Shoot raw and don't sharpen. Increase the contrast a bit in LR or ACR - a light to moderate S-curve will do the job nicely. Unless you live in a vacuum and never change lenses, you will probably get a shock when you look at the small aperture shots which show up dust spots as sharp specks that are invisible at wider apertures. The small aperture shots act as excellent reference maps for what needs spotting until the next sensor clean.

[MMiller]

Nice tip, MDM!