Workflow and File Organization

[PixelRabbit]

Ok HELP!
I just added both Lightroom and Photoshop CS6 to my toolkit and I have tried all day to find a simplified overview of a workflow to no avail.

To this point I have only used DPP so my workflow was to review the images on the card and import the keepers to my external disk (totally disorganized), edit the keepers (exposure, WB, sharpening, saturation and contrast) export the jpegs. Pretty simple but very ineffective .

I'm a horribly disorganized person and I need to make this as simple as possible, if there are too many steps I will tend to skip them. I want to do this right from the start and use the organizing abilities of the programs but I already feel kinda lost. Does anyone have any links to tutorials etc that give an overview of a good workflow using any or all of these programs?

 

[Big Mike]

Get 'The DAM Book' The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

My suggestion would be to start with a good file structure before dealing with Lightroom or Photoshop CS. Organize your files into folders/directories with a system that makes sense to you. For example, I keep my private photos separate from my professional photos but for both, I organize them into folders for year, then date of shoot or upload. The RAW files go into that folder and any print, web or working/editing files go into sub folders.
It should go without saying...but you should backup these files onto a separate drive (or two, or three).

I would suggest learning the ins and outs of Lightroom. It was designed to be a workflow solution for photographers. Basically, you will 'import' your images, at which time Lightroom remembers where the files are, and generates a preview image. This can take a while, if you are going to import your existing images...so don't sit and watch it.

As for figuring out your workflow for future photos, I'd suggest researching Lightroom specifically. There are plenty of great resources (books, sites, videos, classes) for developing your workflow.

How you work PS CS into your workflow, will depend on the type of editing you need/want to do, and just how you design your workflow. Most photographers will do as much as possible in LR, and only use CS when then need to do something that LR can't do. Some will go though LR and then export JPEGs, TIFFs or PSDs, then open them in PS CS one by one.
What I prefer to do, is from inside Lightroom, use the 'Edit in...' command and choose PS CS. That takes the image right into Photoshop where you can do further editing. Then when you save it, the image is automatically brought back into LR (as a TIFF, no longer a Raw). This is great because I can continue to use the other modules of LR with my, now finished, images.

 

[The_Traveler]

BEFORE importing any files into LR, read about keyword hierarchies and learn how to set it up so you can add keywords to your files and the do searches for them.

Crucial

 

[MLeeK]

MY workflow works something like this:
keywording is crucial in any organization system.
I keyword an entire session as it imports. Say today we shot an engagement session for Joe Blow and Jane Doe. It would get keworded with Joe Blow, Jane Doe, Engagement, Month, year and location. Those are the things I most often use to search for an image by. If there is something special I may add that as well.
As for your structure for folders and naming it's all about you. I have a folder for each month and within that month each session for portrait and wedding work. For sports I have a folder for each sport: Football, Volleyball, Wrestling, Basketball, etc. In each of those I have a folder for each event that is named with the home school then the visiting school.
All is stored on my E drive. I store nothing on my C drive but the programs running on the computer. All of that automatically backs up and mirrors onto a second hard drive. Portrait and wedding work gets uploaded to my off site back ups too so I have 3 copies of everything. I don't worry so much about sports being stored off site.

Upon import I have set up my camera raw/lightroom to automatically apply MY default settings-not what photoshop has programmed into it. My defaults are set to recognize each camera that I use and apply the settings according to that as well as ISO's for removing noise.

If I have done my job correctly I can then just run a batch in photoshop that applies my final action and sharpening for each type of photography that I do... BUT... I usually go through a full portrait session or wedding and cull the crap and do a crop on images that are tilted or really need to be trimmed down. It doesn't take me 15 minutes to do a session. I want them ready for PROOFING, but I don't want to invest time into images that they aren't going to order.
Now sports??? RARELY is it that easy with sports because of cycling lights. After import with sports I have to go through each image and adjust white balance and exposure because the cycles do have an effect on that.

I do not do skin softening or do any retouching in raw processing. For a session I will choose a few images-MAYBE 3-that I do a light retouch on so that they know what a final retouch will look like.

Once the batch and the few finished images are done I drop them into a quick slideshow for proofing. I have 15 or so pre-made ones with different music for different situations so that I don't have to do a new slideshow for every client. It's all about speed!

At the proofing session they choose the images to order and I then retouch, crop to order size and do a final sharpening then send for final approval after that. It's the only on-line proofing I do if at all possible.
Order is placed, received, checked, packaged and delivered. Once I am finished with the client I actually delete all raw images. It's just too much to save all of those raws for me. I did for a long time, but I have never gone back and re-processed anything, so I stopped. Then the session moves from my working hard drives to my archive hard drives.
Archiving and updating backups as well as all of my admin tasks are done on a schedule. It just makes it easier to keep tasks up to date if I schedule things like ordering, receiving, packaging, book keeping, etc for a time slot. Otherwise it can get really chaotic and it's easy to forget things!



I have mentioned it a quite a few times around here, but...
DPBestflow is all about workflow in every sense of the word. The website and research contained in it are HUGE HUGE HUGE. YOu can get lost for days, but it's EXCELLENT. I also suggest if you ever get the chance to attend a DPBestflow workshop/seminar DO IT! It seems like a waste of learning time, but it REALLY isn't!!
Welcome | Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow | dpBestflow

 

[MLeeK]

Get 'The DAM Book' The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

My suggestion would be to start with a good file structure before dealing with Lightroom or Photoshop CS. Organize your files into folders/directories with a system that makes sense to you. For example, I keep my private photos separate from my professional photos but for both, I organize them into folders for year, then date of shoot or upload. The RAW files go into that folder and any print, web or working/editing files go into sub folders.
It should go without saying...but you should backup these files onto a separate drive (or two, or three).

I would suggest learning the ins and outs of Lightroom. It was designed to be a workflow solution for photographers. Basically, you will 'import' your images, at which time Lightroom remembers where the files are, and generates a preview image. This can take a while, if you are going to import your existing images...so don't sit and watch it.

As for figuring out your workflow for future photos, I'd suggest researching Lightroom specifically. There are plenty of great resources (books, sites, videos, classes) for developing your workflow.

How you work PS CS into your workflow, will depend on the type of editing you need/want to do, and just how you design your workflow. Most photographers will do as much as possible in LR, and only use CS when then need to do something that LR can't do. Some will go though LR and then export JPEGs, TIFFs or PSDs, then open them in PS CS one by one.
What I prefer to do, is from inside Lightroom, use the 'Edit in...' command and choose PS CS. That takes the image right into Photoshop where you can do further editing. Then when you save it, the image is automatically brought back into LR (as a TIFF, no longer a Raw). This is great because I can continue to use the other modules of LR with my, now finished, images.

DAM is also highly recommended by DPBestflow!!!

 

[Majeed Badizadegan]

Keyword imports. This makes getting back to "Grand Canyon Trip 2009" as simple as a click of a button.

Rate your photos in a way that makes sense to you so you can access them quicky, and work with them efficiently.

Organize your photos in a logical way. Derrel made a good point that by the time we are done on this earth, we'll have 1,000 "IMG_0559's". To avoid this, import with "YYMMDD_IMG_XXXX" which is an option in LR and keeps all the image titles unique.

Learn Lightroom inside and out, upside and down. You'll be very pleased with how powerful a tool it is.

 

[PixelRabbit]

Thanks so much everyone.
MLeek, wow, THAT is why I will likely never have a photography business! MUCHO respect to you (and others) who do it right.
There is great info in everyone's posts, I have a great jumping off point now, I honestly didn't know where to even start!

 

[MLeeK]

Start by setting yourself into a file system.
Then by keywording everything you have already. That'll take some time!

 

[PixelRabbit]

You aren't kidding about taking "some" time lol
I've been trying to reduce the number of images I have before I start setting the file system and keywording, I've been working on this for a while already and I'm wondering how much is enough?

I'm literally going through my first year of shots and I have a LOT of images of the same subjects and I'm wondering exactly how many bees, birds, random critter... shots one realistically should keep at this point?

I suppose I don't want to regret getting rid of too much but also don't want to keep too much.

 

[Big Mike]

I don't do it on a schedule....but when I find the time, I go back through my old photos and delete anything but the best ones. You have to think that if you haven't gone back to look at your random images in a long while...will you ever? That's where a good labeling and rating system will come in handy. Some people will go as far a using the full 5 star system of how they rate their photos. But if you do that, do you really think you will ever use a 3 star (or lower) image? Probably not, so why hold onto them?
But if you at least go through and pick/rate/color the ones that you do want to keep, then it becomes easier to just get rid of the rest.
So in your situation, I'd maybe go though the images and pick only the best one or two shots of any time/location/subject and get rid of the rest.

Another thing to do (which I haven't, but maybe I should) is to convert some of the archived photos to JPEG, rather than keeping the Raw files. For something like a wedding or portrait shoot (I still keep those files), you probably won't need the unedited raw images once the job is done. But if you still want to keep the files on hand, you can save a ton of hard drive space by using JPEG instead.

As for key wording, I agree that it's quite important. I do try to add them when I import...but I also have plenty of archived photos that I should go back and keyword because I didn't do it at the time. Don't do it one at a time, it's very easy (once in LR) to add multiple keywords to multiple images at once.

 

[PixelRabbit]

Thanks Mike, luckily I've been rating the best of the bunch 90% of the time when I import from my card. I have been tempted to not even look, just extract them from the folders, delete the rest and start with only those... but I'm scared I'm going to miss something doing it that way. It wouldn't be out of character for me to come in from shooting something totally excited and editing the shots w/o rating them.

 

[PixelRabbit]

Well, I finally got through all the folders, deleted at least 20,000 raw files (my god!!)
Now to go through the keepers in the main folders and sort them.... This is NOT FUN!

 

[Big Mike]

Are you 'inside' Lightroom yet?

Unless you image files are totally jumbled, you shouldn't need to 'sort' them per say. It's a good idea to have some structure...but once you actually import them into LR, you can label, rate, sort, organize etc. without actually having to move the files around.

 

[PixelRabbit]

No, not in Lightroom yet, I finished culling the files and putting them into "main folders" sorted by subject yesterday. I'm assuming that is enough structure to start with?

 

[The_Traveler]

No, not in Lightroom yet, I finished culling the files and putting them into "main folders" sorted by subject yesterday. I'm assuming that is enough structure to start with?

NO.
Unless you have a hierarchical keyword list set up in LR, you are gooing to waste an enormous effort.