A while ago I replied to a tweet by Kerry Garrison (@KerryGarrison)Â of cameradojo.com where he asked for ideas for a short video tutorial he could do. Lightroom import workflow was my idea and it seemed to have resonated with him…
At the time I was starting to shoot more often and I was filling up memory cards and hdd space, so I needed a good strategy to already on import apply the right presets and sort out my images so that I could streamline the post processing phase.
A big part of how a raw image is going to show up on a screen is what camera profile you use. Certain profiles apply more “pop” to your images. So just by changing your profile you can get a part of the way to a finished shot. On export this “pop” gets baked in. I tend to import with the Adobe Standard profile, this at least on my screen does not give the image as much “pop” as Camera Standard but gets it to where I want my starting point to be. As a side note, this only works on raw images.
The whole point of developing an import workflow is to streamline the process of creating a ready to publish image. So as another side note, why not bake in some IPTC information, such as the author name, website and email as well as a copyright notice at the time of import? This text you input in the “Copyright” field can later be used by Lightroom to tag your images on export. The same applies to keywords. Searching for an image is so much easier when Lightroom has at least a few terms to constrain the search results.
Apart from butchering my name (and who can blame him? I’m gonna start including a phonetic pronunciation of it from now on) Garrison’s tip is gold. Check out the video he posted: