I have two main workflows when it comes to editing photographs - desktop and mobile. Until this year, the mobile workflow was very primitive targeted for social media posts however, I have modified it recently by bringing in advanced tools to align with the desktop workflow. This is a quick blog post describing the core elements in my desktop workflow.
The desktop workflow is primarily for editing photographs I take with the Sony system (and previously a Nikon system, both with hybrid lenses). 99% of the time I shoot with airplane mode enabled to preserve battery, especially since I mostly shoot still images as well as time-lapse sequences in the same trips or sessions. The post shooting journey begins with transferring the images (RAW files) to a staging folder in my laptop. The culled RAW files will almost always end up in a backup - local and/or cloud depending on the assignment or intent for future use.
Before we dive into the workflow I want to set the context to the example image file I will be using.
This image was taken during our trip to Glacier National Park in late-September, 2020. This was my first trip ever to the park and the primary intent of visit was not photography (Emily and I wanted to get away for a few days after we hitched). While I was hoping to see early signs of fall, it was not quite the scenery but these storms bringing in rain and snow moved through the area every day and combined with occasional sun creating amazing display of light and shadows throughout the visit. I was shooting mostly handheld, with ISO set to AUTO, adjusting only shutter speed and aperture. I thought evenly exposing bright background and dark, narrow silhouetted foreground under stormy weather would be a challenge however, keeping ISO at AUTO allowed me to worry about it later.
I knew right there while taking this shot what I want the final export to look like: Dark clouds moving across a bright blue sky, the falling rain columns across the valley contrasting to the dark shadows in the foreground.
When not stitching time-lapse video or panoramic composite, I go straight to Photoshop. I’d spend some time in adjusting highlights, shadows, temperature (white balance) and tint until I have the the image appear as close as possible to the desired final state. I know a lot of photographers emphasize on getting the “details” in the image by adjusting to the histogram but, this is not always the case with me. I’ll admit most of the time I’d want most (if not all) of the pixels in the image to have adequate data (i.e. not over or under exposed) however, this is not the ground rule in all instances. It really depends on what you want and aiming for in the end result.
Once I have applied the initial adjustments to the RAW file and opened the image in a Photoshop document (PSD), we are now in an open playground. Editing in Photoshop could take anything between a few minutes to hours depending on what I am trying to achieve. Very specific to the example, I applied the following (in order of applying/working on) adjustments:
Saturation boost to the bright background (sky and clouds) while masking the darker foreground (mountains)
Vignette using curves mask
Exposure boost to the foreground, then mask the bright/otherwise overexposed portion of the sky (likely where the Sun was behind thin clouds)
Warming filter to foreground
As I had mentioned before there is no one-recipe for all images in my workflow. Keeping a mental (or written) note of the post processing goal at the time of shooting the photo helps.
I’d almost always discard the PSD file in favor of storing the RAW files unless there is a need to perform multiple exports - e.g. if I want to print or distribute in more than one format. I think Photoshop does a very decent export job therefore, I will use it as often as I can although there are exceptions like when I need to de-noise an image prefer Lightroom. Typically, de-noise step happens prior to editing, as an extra step before importing into Photoshop.