There is a specific kind of pain that comes from importing 1,500 forty-five megapixel raw files onto a laptop that was not built for the job. I know this pain. I have sat in hotel rooms at 11pm, waiting on a progress bar, knowing I still had to cull, edit, and deliver before a client call the next morning. Workflow is not a glamorous subject, but it is the thing that separates photographers who control their time from photographers whose time controls them.
Watch the full tutorial on YouTube
In this Tony and Chelsea Northrup tutorial, Tony walks through what he calls his “ruthless raw workflow,” developed after shooting over 1,500 frames at Conowingo Dam in Maryland photographing eagles at nine frames per second. The volume is almost comical. But the system he built to handle that volume is genuinely smart, and several of the habits he describes are ones I wish someone had drilled into me fifteen years ago when I was grinding through commercial studio shoots with no real system at all.
Step 1: Shoot JPEG and RAW Simultaneously
Tony explaining dual-card RAW and JPEG shooting setup
If your camera has two card slots, use them differently. Write raw files to one card and JPEGs to the other. The JPEG card becomes your fast-turnaround tool when you are on the road and need to share images quickly. Pull the JPEG card, import it to your laptop, and you are working with small, already-processed files that do not demand much from your hardware.
The raw card stays in the camera as a safety net. If you hit an image where the JPEG shadows are completely blocked up or the highlights are clipped beyond saving, you pull just that one raw file and process it independently. You are not committing to processing everything in raw. You are keeping the option available when it actually matters.
Step 2: Use Lossless Raw Compression In-Camera
Camera menu showing lossless compressed RAW option selected
Before you shoot a single frame, go into your camera’s image quality settings and enable lossless raw compression. This is not lossy compression. Nothing is being thrown away. The file size shrinks because the encoding is more efficient, similar to the way a ZIP file reduces size without deleting any data. On cameras like the Nikon Z series or Sony bodies, this setting can cut your raw file sizes down significantly without any measurable impact on image quality.
Smaller files mean faster import times. Faster import times mean you spend less time staring at a progress bar and more time actually working. For anyone running Lightroom on a mid-range laptop, this single setting change is worth doing before your next shoot.
Step 3: Delete Ruthlessly In-Camera Before You Ever Import
Tony reviewing and deleting images on camera LCD in the field
This is the step that feels tedious until you realize how much time it saves downstream. While you are waiting for your food to arrive, while your travel companion is in the bathroom, while you are sitting in the car between locations, flip through your frames on the camera’s LCD and delete the obvious rejects. Out-of-focus frames, blown exposures, accidental shots of the ground – they are gone before they ever touch your hard drive.
Tony mentions enabling a simplified deletion option in the camera menu, which on some bodies lets you delete a frame with just two button presses instead of navigating a confirmation dialog. It is a small thing but it adds up. The goal is to never let garbage files reach Lightroom. Every frame you delete in-camera is a frame Lightroom does not have to generate a preview for, a thumbnail your system does not have to cache, a decision you will not have to make later when you are tired.
Step 4: Apply Star Ratings In-Camera
Camera rating interface showing 5-star applied to keeper image
Many cameras, particularly higher-end Canon bodies and several newer mirrorless options, let you apply star ratings directly on the camera during playback. When you spot a genuinely strong frame, mark it five stars right there on the camera. When those files import into Lightroom, the ratings come with them.
The practical result is that you can filter your entire import down to five-star images the moment it finishes and go straight to your best frames without a single pass of culling in Lightroom. For event photographers, wildlife shooters, or anyone dealing with high burst volumes, this habit alone can cut your post-production time in half.
Step 5: Import Only What You Need, Filter Immediately
Lightroom catalog filtered to show only 5-star rated images after import
Once your import is complete, do not scroll through every frame. Filter by your in-camera star ratings immediately and work only from that filtered view. Lightroom’s filter bar at the top of the filmstrip makes this a two-click operation. If you rated your keepers in-camera, you now have a curated edit waiting for you instead of a wall of thumbnails to dig through.
Process just those flagged images. Export. Deliver. Everything else can wait for a second pass later, or be deleted entirely. The workflow is named ruthless for a reason.
What I Would Add From My Own Experience
The in-camera deletion habit is the one most photographers resist, and I understand why. There is always a voice that says “maybe I can save that one in post.” After fifteen years of commercial work, I have learned to trust that voice less. The frames that feel like maybes in the field are almost never the ones that make it to delivery. They just add time.
Where I extend Tony’s system is in the import step itself. I use an import preset in Lightroom that applies my base develop settings automatically, adds copyright metadata, and drops files into a folder structure organized by shoot date and client. By the time the import bar finishes, every file already has my standard tone curve and lens correction applied. Combined with the in-camera culling Tony describes, I can go from memory card to edited selects faster than most people finish their first pass of culling. I keep a running log of how much time my batch systems save me, and habits like these are a large reason that number keeps climbing.
The core idea behind all of this is simple: every decision you can make before you open Lightroom is a decision you do not have to make inside Lightroom. The software is for editing, not sorting. Push as much of the sorting upstream as you can, into the camera, into the import dialog, into your folder structure, and the editing work that actually requires your creative attention will feel much lighter.
Watch the full tutorial on YouTube to see Tony walk through the complete workflow with his actual eagle shoot files – it is worth watching just to see the scale of what he is managing and how cleanly the system handles it.
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