Workflow and file organization

[sambisu]

One very nice thing about LightRoom, The develop module was designed to allow a generally accepted workflow from top to bottom of the adjustment panel. In other words, start at the top of the adjustment panel and work your way down. I try and stick to this and it seems to work very well. Then, if you need to make specific adjustments, "edit in" Photoshop and make desired adjustments, then simply hit the save button and the image will be saved with edits back into the lightroom catologue. Agree with the others---sharpening and NR should be one of the last things you do.

I am noticing this. But why would you do lens correction at the end? Wouldn't you want to start with that?

[cls]

I am noticing this. But why would you do lens correction at the end? Wouldn't you want to start with that?

Yes, at least I prefer to do leveling/cropping before further editing, and before that I want to apply lens correction.

Another handy thing about LR is that you actually don’t do any changes to the image while “editing”. What you do can rather be seen as creating a recipe for image generation, and this isn’t actually applied until you export an image file. When the recipe is applied, your edits are applied in "proper order" regardless of the order you made them. This means that technically the order in which you do adjustments in LR isn’t important.

However, it's also true that it could be a good idea to do the sharpening towards the end of the process: Basic edits like exposure, shadow fill, black point etc. affect image noise, and therefore you want to adjust the noise reduction setting after such edits. And since the sharpening/noise settings also affect each other, it’s a good idea to adjust them together. (The final image will look exactly the same even if you would jump to the sharpening amount slider the first thing you do, and then do the rest. Most of us just don't prefer that order.)