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workflow00.txt

For the majority of photos taken the photographic workflow can be
summarized by two steps:

1) Aim the camera in the general direction of the subject

2) Press the shutter

In the film era there was also:

3) Take the film to the drugstore to get prints made.

For many people what happens after the shutter is pressed is just as
important as what happens when it is pressed. There are three basic
goals to the photographic workflow:

1) Make sure that no photos that you want to keep get lost.

2) Select the photos to display.

3) Prepare the selected photos sufficiently well for the purpose
intended.

There is also the meta-goal:

4) Accomplish the the workflow in the shortest practical amount of time.

I am currently using Lightroom 6 and my workflow is based on what is
available there. However this is not meant as a cookbook procedure,
but as general guidelines so that you can develop something that works
for you.

Loss prevention

Ask anybody that works with computers, it is not a question of if you
will lose your stored data, only when, how and whether you can
recover. Another basic tenet is that untested backups are not
backups. If you haven't checked the integrity of your backups and that
of your restoration process, you don't have backups and you will
discover this when the aforementioned disaster occurs and you try to
recover. 

My basic loss prevention strategy is when I import my photos in
lightroom, I rename the files with the YYYYMMDD date and the file
number (also my initials).  One copy goes into my working directory on
an SSD and a second copy goes onto a different, spinny, hard drive in
case something happens to the SSD.

My file selection process will involve sorting photos into directories
(folders) and I take the risk of not making more backups until I'm
done processing.

Once I am done processing my photos, the photos are moved from the SSD
to the primary storage spnny drive (currently photo_ab), the primary
backup drive which is plugged into my main machine (photo_bu_05) and a
copy is made onto my network attached raid-5 storage.

At some point (usually when a backup drive is full) it gets removed
from the computer and moved someplace for offsite storage.  Experience
has taught that when my primary storage is full it is economically
feasible to go to a significantly larger hard drive, so all of the
files on my primary storage are copied to larger primary hard drives
and those also become offsite storage.

Note that there are some major vulnerabilities in my backup strategy,
not the least of which is that everything recent is all on the same
property and a significant catastrophe could cause me to lose
everything. I'm not doing this as a business and I figure that if I
lose my house and everything else that I own, I'm not going to worry
overmuch about the raw files of my recent photos.

Directory structure:

Some people in the Adobe Lightroom camp consider the directory tree to be
utterly irrelevant, all information of importance is in the data
base. I disagree, not the least because that makes it much more
difficult to ever change to any software besides Lightroom.

My directory structure is basically:
Half Year (for reasons this works better for me than whole years)
Month
YYMMDD_shoot
special categorizing.

So my photos of a particular car at a recent carshow are in the
directory:

.../pictures_2021b/2109/210926_car_show/jaguar/etype_white

Photos taken in July-December of 2021 are in pictures_2021b
September photos are in 2109 (YYMM)
All of my photos of the british car show are in 210926_car_show
Within that day I sorted the photos to brand and specific car

This directory structure makes it very straightforward for me to find
any photo so long as I know when it was taken.  A raw file would be
named 20210926-LRC16448.DNG and therefore a jpeg from it would be
20210926-LRC16448.JPG 

Preparing, Selecting and processing the photos:

Preparation:

Selecting and processing are intrinsically interlinked. This process
usually goes more smoothly if you do some very basic correction and
preparation first. If you are taking your photos with the goal of the
best final product the default previews of all of the photos will not
be something usable.  Most of the time that I am shooting outside of
the studio I will bracket my photos, usually "nominal" and two stops
under (-2 ev). Sometimes I do this for the option recombining into an
HDR image, often just to make sure that I don't blow out highlights,
or because the final image quality is better pushing harder on the ISO
than on the shutter speed.

My first step is to put everything in grid view, select all of the
underexposed images, bump their exposure up to nominal, select any of
the over exposed images, bump their exposure down. Sometimes it is
appropriate to just select everything and hit "autotone" but I find
that what Lightroom considers a good nominal exposure doesn't work
well in partcular with low key or high key lighting.

At this point I do things like set white balance based on greycard
shots ( I usually just take photos of black lenscaps ), sort things
out into subdirectories and so forth.  I may make mass corrections to
groups of photos in similar lighting to get them closer to right for
later. 

This is usually when I generate all of my 1:1 previews because having
them pre-generated makes it a lot easier to scan through my photos. I
do tend to make the "smart previews" on import because it doesn't
matter when they are made ahead of time.

If I am working with a large group of diverse photos, once the previews
are made I will then sort photos out into topical subdirectories, that
makes it easier to choose between similar photos.

I also find this to be a good time to do basic keywording of photos
so that months or years later I can make use of that fancy Lightroom
database and more easily find specific photos.

Selection:

One of the wonderful things about shooting with a digital camera is
that it costs fractons of a penny to press the shutter.  Last I
checked, disk storage was about $20 per Terabyte.  If you have your
primary and four backups, that's $100 per TB.  If each raw frame is
50MB that is 20,000 frames per terabyte or about two frames per
penny.

As such it can be easy to end up with hundreds or thousands of frames
to go through from each shoot.  Doing this quickly and efficiently
becomes very important.  My basic technique is to do my passes as
quickly as possible until I am down to a manageable number.  As such
at each phase of the process, if I can't quickly decide on whether to
keep or discard a frame, I defer the decision to the next round.

Lightroom allows you to rate photos 1-5 stars. My interpretation of
this is:

0: Unrated
1: There is nothing usable in the file, completely black, white or out
of focus
2: Meh, nothing critically wrong, not worth looking at for now
3: Nominally this means the photo might be good enough to post on the
web. Effectively this means it is good enough to come back and look at
again.
4: The photo is good enough to spend money on a print
5: The photo is good enough to go into my portfolio

During this first fast pass I may do some basic adjustment.  Also, if I
see a photo that is so absolutely amazing I know for sure it will make
it through the next several rounds, I will flag it with P/pick.

After, and sometimes during, each pass I may go through and make a
round of adjustments, followed by rebuilding the 1:1 previews.

At this point to winnow things down I use three tools.  The Pick flag,
lightroom collections, and the color flags (red/6, yellow/7, green/8,
blue/9).

The pick flag is what I use to simply say that this frame advances to
the next round. Note, that at first the primary goal is speed so
rather than spending time debating, just hit P and move on.  I'll
select all of those photos and put them in a numbered topical
lightroom collection:  210926_carshow_00, 210926_carshow_01 etc.
Collections don't cost anything and this way I can always go back and
look at photos that got disqualified somewhere along the way.

One of the most useful tools for me when selecting photos is somebody
else's opinion.  Their ratings are purely advisory but often very
helpful for narrowing down the photos by 30-60%.  This is also very
helpful when they are the "customer", for example you are doing a
portrait session.  I use the color flags to have the following
meanings:

6/red:    I hate it
7/yellow: meh
8/green:  I like it
9/blue:   This is fantastic, it needs to make it into the final cut

The premise of this workflow is to delay any work/time spent as long
as possible so that by the time you only spend time working on the
very best of your photos.  At each round of selection I'm willing to
put in more effort on the subtle adjustments to each photo.

Note that once I have selected the photos to post on social media
(flickr in my case) there are often a couple other rounds of
selection. On flickr I have albums for may favorite photos of each
quarter of a year.  If I really, REALLY like a photo, I'll put it in
the appropriate folder (21q3).  Also, there is the question of which
ones I'm willing to spend the money on to print as a 12x18 to go into
my show off portfolio.