Photography workflow

[Clone3d]

Seeing as we don't have a photography forum, I'll just post this here.

A thought occured to me today while I was outside taking pictures. What is your workflow? Do you shoot raw or jpeg, do you use lightroom, aperture or another program to organise your images, or does windows explorer suffice? Do you use one program to edit, or do you jump between? And how do you organise your pictures on your computer? By theme, year, date or aperture (Yes, I know a person that does this).

[reflex]

I generally shoot in jpg, I'm not perfectionist enough to shoot and edit RAW files. On rare occasions I shoot in RAW, if I know I'll be shooting something that's really cool, but yeah, almost always jpg. When I use RAW I just import the individual files into Photoshop with camera raw, and work from there.
I organise my photos in a folder, with subfolders for each photoshoot I do, named as the date and a short description [yyyymmdd_description], and then another subfolder with selected images that I've edited/cropped/processed. Pretty simple, and easy to handle.
So yeah, nothing fancy. Photoshop and manual filehandling in explorer.

[mr_charisma]

I shoot in RAW. At the moment I'm shooting in RAW+JPEG, since I'm trying to take black and white photos for this contest, and that way I can see the pic in black and white on the camera. Normally though, I just shoot in RAW.

I coughed up the cash for Lightroom not long after version 3 was released. It is a really great tool. I use it for copying from the camera, and pretty much all my adjustments. I find that I don't really ever need to do anything in Photoshop. I did however buy Photomatix, and have been playing around with HDR photography a little bit. Luckily that has reasonably good plugin support for LightRoom.

As for organisation; well I haven't found any program that imports exactly how I want. My folder structure looks like this:

YYYY-MM - Description

I normally only export JPEGs from Lightroom to actually do something with them (upload, print), so I've suddenly become much more into making sure the Lightroom catalogue and all the RAWs are backed up.

[Marscaleb]

I use a cell-phone. And sometimes a funsaver.

...yeah I'll be quiet now.

[Lonepig]

Shooting 100% RAW into Lightroom 3. Convert to DNG and copy to second network drive on import. I convert to DNG as I use a laptop and desktop and I find this to be the easiest way to always work on the correct version of a file. 90% of all work done within Lightroom, if trying something different its exported as a 16bit PSD into Photoshop. Photoshop is also used if making a large image for softproofing, further noise reduction(Noise Ninja) and sharpening(Unsharp Mask) prior to printing.

Images are store by date, folder structure. Then Briefly keyworded and sorted in to collections.

[mr_charisma]

Lonepig: Can you give us some more details about how you share the lightroom catalogue and pictures between your laptop and desktop? This is one of the more annoying aspects for me.

[neelz]

I have never used Lightroom, but can't you use Dropbox for sharing stuff like that?