My Lightroom workflow

[sharadm]

I'm getting ready to move all my photos & future workflow to Lightroom, thought I'd put my workflow here so more experienced people could point out any obvious inefficiencies.

I shoot raw, and at the end of the workflow I like to end up with 4 copies of each photo - an archived raw image, an edited & processed PSD, a print resolution jpg, and a screen resolution jpg. I have identical folder structures under these 4 roots where the photos live.

The workflow is:
1) Copy all images into a special "unprocessed" folder under the archive root & import them into lightroom
2) Process them - iteratively refine the keepers and move them into appropriately named folders under the archive root. Create a named collection for each folder. Develop the keepers and keyword them.
3) Export all the new folders created under "archive root" into PSD's in a corresponding new folder created under the "edit root".
4) Run photoshop scripts on the edited files to do things like noise reduction (I use NoiseNinja) for high ISO, and capture sharpening (I use photokit sharpener). Any other special PS editing required.
5) Run photoshop scripts that automatically create print & web versions of the edited file in the right folders after sharpening (using photokit).
6) Import the edit, print & screen folders into the same collection in lightroom that was created in step 2. Use automatic stacking with 0 secs time to automatically stack the 4 versions of the same image together. Attach a "image type" keyword (edit, print, screen) to the imported images appropriately on import.

This should I believe let me end up with a collection for every "shoot", with all versions of the images stacked together, and findable using keywords etc. I also have PSD's that contain all the master information that I can easily backup as files (I'm paranoid and don't like my information salted away in DB's where they can get corrupted).

Comments?

[sharadm]

Bah - just saw this other thread http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=16785 which seems to say stacking only works within the same folder. That clearly makes my workflow non-functional. This seems like a really stupid restriction.

Any ideas on other ways to keep multiple versions of an image together if they are in different folders?

[digitaldog]

Bah - just saw this other thread http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=16785 which seems to say stacking only works within the same folder. That clearly makes my workflow non-functional. This seems like a really stupid restriction.

Any ideas on other ways to keep multiple versions of an image together if they are in different folders?
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Collections?

I will say, keep the folder structure in mind, whatever you do. For example, I like to keep folders of similar imagery (or some might use each as a job). So I have a folder of just dog shots, a folder of each trip I take etc. I like the fact that I can batch rename using the folder name. So between that and using a unique data, I know where the image resides (based on folder) and what the image is (based on folder name).

If you want to then mix up all this stuff, collections are key.

[Mark Graf]

Assuming you put each import into a separate hard drive folder under your 'unprocessed' parent  - a collections for each might be redundant.  Is there an advantage to creating a collection of a shoot if it is already in a separate folder?

[larryg]

Mark, I am just getting organized with Lightroom.  It looks great so far.

I keep the raw files in their own folder based on shoot example: Death Valley main folder with sub folders and dates.
When I process an image I plan on giving it a score (stars) and yellow flag (This is similar I did with slides when scanned).
I also think I will copy all processed images into a catalog (processed raw)  
I only process the possible printable images.

Still contemplating other ways to categorize my images.

I think the key words will be good for subject matter?   you could also then make category folders for different subject matters

[larryg]

Mark, I am just getting organized with Lightroom.  It looks great so far.

I keep the raw files in their own folder based on shoot example: Death Valley main folder with sub folders and dates.
When I process an image I plan on giving it a score (stars) and yellow flag (This is similar I did with slides when scanned).
I also think I will copy all processed images into a catalog (processed raw)  
I only process the possible printable images.

Still contemplating other ways to categorize my images.

I think the key words will be good for subject matter?   you could also then make category folders for different subject matters

[sharadm]

Mark,

The reason I was thinking of creating a collection for each shoot was so that I could have all versions of the images related to that shoot together. For example, all the raw images might be in "archive\shoot1", all the edited pictures might be in "edits\shoot1", and the web rendered & sharpened images might be in "screen\shoot1". I was hoping to create one collection that had all of these, with the different versions of each image in a single stack. Unfortunately this does not look possible since stacking doesn't work in collections.

Looks like I will have to live with more unwieldy solutions where I use keywords to distinguish between the "types" of image (i.e. archive/edit/screen) and then filter out what I see using that. This is suboptimal since lightroom does not do a great job of making it easy to combine/filter using keywords either (it only allows "OR" by highlighting, to do an "AND" you have to do a text search which is slow), but hopefully subsequent versions will fix this.

[judyn]

You have a lot more options in Lightroom than simply keywords for categorizing your images.  Because metadata is (or can be) stored in the images or in xmp sidecars, I'm using metadata for everything I can.  Collection information is not stored in metadata.

I am mirroring my folder structure in metadata and I've chosen to use Job Identifier for this, although there are a number of fields that could be used.  That's in the Workflow section.  For comments that I want to be able to retrieve, I use the Instructions field in Workflow.