Production

The production phase is where you hand-polish the select images that deserve the bulk of your time and attention, hand-tuning the Camera Raw settings, and bringing the images into Photoshop for the kinds of selective corrections that Camera Raw simply isn't designed to do. The exercise of your creative judgement is one aspect of the workflow that you can't automate, but automation can and will speed up the execution of that creative judgment.

Before looking at the individual phases, though, you need to make some strategic decisions, and to make those, you need to absorb two basic principles of workflow efficiency.