What's new
Photoshop Gurus Forum

Welcome to Photoshop Gurus forum. Register a free account today to become a member! It's completely free. Once signed in, you'll enjoy an ad-free experience and be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

A Workflow Issue


BruceBanner

Member
Messages
8
Likes
1
Hi everyone,

I'm taking some time off over this festive period and reflecting on my workflow this year and how I process my images for clients, from the moment I take the shot through to delivering satisfactory images for the client.

Here is my current workflow;

1) Camera; Take pics (mainly RAWs, DNG's)
2) LR; Import to LR (involving culling)
3) LR; Basic Adjustments and pass exported files (smaller size) for client to choose selection for which to edit
4) LR; From the selection, rendering style is chosen, 3Dlut, presets, tweaks and further basic adjustments to suit
5) PS; If necessary, at this point, right click>Edit In PS and then do cloning, Frequency Separation, Dodging & Burning or access 3rd party plugin as a layer etc, finally hitting 'Save'
6) LR File is now .Tif in LR, Export As.

Done.

My issue with this is that the rendering is done before the PS work. The renderers/3Dluts in LR seem to prefer the RAW dng file, not the PS Tif file.

If I do;

1) Camera; Take pics (mainly RAWs, DNG's)
2) LR; Import to LR (involving culling)
3) LR; Basic Adjustments and pass exported files (smaller size) for client to choose selection for which to edit
4) PS; If necessary, at this point, right click>Edit In PS and then do cloning, Frequency Separation, Dodging & Burning or access 3rd party plugin as a layer etc, finally hitting 'Save'
5) LR File is now .Tif in LR
6) LR; From the selection, rendering style is chosen, 3Dlut, presets, tweaks and further basic adjustments to suit
7) LR; Export As

then the render/3dLuts are not the same as they applied to .tif, they are not as good/accurate as to what they are when being applied to a RAW DNG file.

The crux of the issue is, when working for a client, if you hand over your final edits and they are not pleased with your render style, then you have a lot of work to do all over again, including the PS cloning stuff. I was hoping to do the PS work first, then apply the render, then if they do not like that render choice/style you can fairly easily change to a different selection, but that doesn't really work great under Tiff'd PS files compared to their native RAW DNG versions.

I had one friend suggest that you introduce an extra step that once you do the basic adjustment and they have chosen the images they want you to work on, then offer a max of 3-4 rendering styles for the rest of the work to be completed under. Then you (both) settle on a render, do PS work, Export and done.

My problem with this is with large events such as weddings, a single render style might not work for some of the other lighting scenarios throughout the day (including artificial/flash monents vs natural light). You might come up with 3-4 different renders that work well for the 200 odd photographs, example;

A: Morning of wedding ; 50 photos all under similar lighting conditions, Render using preset 'A' is fine.
B: Midday (Ceremony); 50 photos all under similar lighting conditions, Render using preset 'A' is not good, must choose a new style/3dlut
C: Formal Shots; 50 photos all under similar lighting conditions, Render using either of above styles not good, new style must be used
D: Evening reception; 50 photos all under similar lighting conditions, Render using either of above styles not good, new style must be used

It feels like too much client involvement and in fact a good deal of the 'big reveal' lost in the process. It would mean offering the client 3-4 different rendering styles for A, B, C and D... In addition to that, I can still see clients saying "Oh... that is nice... I know we agreed on style 'X' but could I now have a look at them all in style 'Y'?", so sometimes I fear giving too much choice to the client, endless circle of over editing/styling...

I'm wondering if its time to ditch LR and head over to another program that is more of a 'all-in-one' system, everything under one roof, just so that I can avoid the LR>PS>LR>Render issue...

Thoughts?

TIA!

BB
 

Top