Workflow Phases

We've spent most of this chapter looking at the various tools offered by Bridge and Camera Raw. But knowing what buttons to push to get the desired result just means you know how to do the work. To turn that understanding into a practical workflow, you need to understand and optimize each part of the process.

There are four basic stages in a raw workflow. You may revisit some of themgoing back and looking at the initial rejects, or processing the images to different kinds of output filebut everything you do falls into one of four stages.

• Image ingestion. You start by copying the raw images to at least one hard disk on the computer.

• Image verification. You point Bridge at the newly copied images and let it cache the thumbnails, previews, and metadata.

• Preproduction. You work with the images in Bridge, selecting, sorting, applying metadata, and editing with Camera Raw.

• Production. You process the raw images to output files.

In the remainder of this chapter, we'll look at each of these four stages, but our major emphasis lies in the preproduction stagethe work you do in Bridgebecause about 80 percent of the actual work happens in this stage, even if it only takes about 20 percent of the time spent.