Workflow Principles

There are likely as many workflows are there are photographersmaybe more! One of the wonderful things about Bridge, Camera Raw 3.0, and Photoshop CS2 is the incredible workflow flexibility that they offer. The price of this flexibility is, of course, complexity. There are multiple ways to accomplish almost any task, and it may not be obvious at first glance which way is optimal in a given situation. Understanding the different ways of accomplishing the basic tasks is the tactical level. But to make a workflow, you also need a strategy that tells you how and when to employ those tactics.

Even a single photographer may need more than one workflow. On the one hand, there's the workflow you need when you're on a shoot, the client is looking over your shoulder, and you need to agree on the hero shots before you strike the lighting and move on. On the other hand, there's the workflow you'd like to follow when you're reviewing personal work with no deadlines attached. These two scenarios represent extremes, and there are many points on the continuum between them.

We can't build your workflow for you, since we know neither your needs nor your preferences. Instead, we'll offer two key principles of workflow efficiency that should always guide you in how to employ them.

• Do things once, efficiently.

• Do things automatically whenever possible.

Doing Things Once

When you apply metadata such as copyright, rights management, and keywords to your raw file, the metadata is automatically carried through to all the TIFFs, JPEGs, or PSDs that you derive from that raw file, so you only need to enter that metadata once.

By the same token, if you exploit the power of Camera Raw to its fullest, many of your images may need little or no postconversion work in Photoshop, so applying Camera Raw edits to your images is likewise something that can often be done only once.

A key strategy that helps you do things once is: Start with the general and proceed to the specific. Start with the things that can be done to the greatest number of images, then make increasingly more detailed treatments of ever-decreasing numbers of images, reserving the full treatmentcareful hand-editing in Camera Raw and Photoshop, applying image-specific keywords, and so onto those images that truly deserve the attention.

Do Things Automatically

Automation is a vital survival tool for simply dealing with the volumes of data a raw workflow entails. Once you've told a computer how to do something, it can do that something over and over again. Photoshop actions are obvious automation features, but metadata templates and Camera Raw presets are important automations, too.

We rarely open a single image from Camera Raw directly into Photoshop unless we're stacking multiple renderings of the raw file into the same Photoshop image. Even then, we use the Option-Open shortcut to open the images as copies so that we don't have to rename them manually in Photoshopthat, too, is an automation feature!

In the vast majority of cases, we convert our raw images using either Batch or Image Processor, and we use actions to create adjustment layers so that the images are immediately ready for editing.

Be Methodical

Once you've found a rhythm that works for you, stick to it. Being methodical and sticking to a routine makes mistakes less likely, and allows you to focus on the important image decisions that only you can make.

For better or worse, computers always do exactly what you tell them to, even if that's jumping off a cliff. Established routines (and Actions) help ensure that you're telling the computer to do what you really want it to.