Lightroom Workflow

Ruthless by Design: Tony Northrup's Raw Workflow and What It Taught Me About Cutting the Fat
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Ruthless by Design: Tony Northrup's Raw Workflow and What It Taught Me About Cutting the Fat

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.

How I'd Structure My Landscape Editing Workflow (And What This Tutorial Got Right)
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How I'd Structure My Landscape Editing Workflow (And What This Tutorial Got Right)

There’s a specific kind of dread that hits when you open a folder called “Photos - Misc 2022” and realize you have no idea what’s in it. I’ve been organizing digital assets professionally for fifteen years, and I still see photographers - talented ones - lose hours every month just hunting for files. The capture is the fun part. What happens after you get home determines whether that work ever sees the light of day in a coherent, repeatable way.

Music, Copyright, and the Lightroom Workflow Detail Most Photographers Overlook
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Music, Copyright, and the Lightroom Workflow Detail Most Photographers Overlook

There’s a part of the post-production process most photographers treat as an afterthought: the slideshow. You’ve culled, edited, color-graded, exported, and then you drop in whatever song felt right, burn a video, and send it to the client. I did exactly that for the first few years of my career, and I was lucky nobody called me on it. When I finally sat down with Jared Platt’s Ultimate Lightroom Workflow workshop on CreativeLive, I expected to walk away with faster culling techniques and better export settings.

How to Edit Aviation Photos in Lightroom: A Fast 5-Step Workflow That Actually Works
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How to Edit Aviation Photos in Lightroom: A Fast 5-Step Workflow That Actually Works

Most of my clients shoot products or campaigns under controlled light. Aviation photographers get none of that luxury. They’re chasing fast-moving metal across unpredictable skies, handing off RAW files that are flat, noisy, and frequently lacking the contrast that makes a military jet look like it’s actually moving. When those files land in Lightroom, the edit has to work harder than usual — and it has to work fast. In this KelbyOne tutorial, photographer and educator Scott Kelby runs a blind edit on a reader-submitted A-10 Warthog photo, and the workflow he uses maps cleanly onto almost any aviation or airshow shot.

The Lightroom Preset Trick That Saves You From Rebuilding the Same Look Over and Over
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The Lightroom Preset Trick That Saves You From Rebuilding the Same Look Over and Over

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from building a look you love inside Lightroom, knowing you’re going to want it again, and then realizing you can’t save it the way you’d expect. I’ve been doing post-production work for fifteen years, and I still run into this. You develop a multi-step technique, something that takes four or five minutes to apply manually, and your brain immediately starts calculating how many times you’ll have to repeat that process across a shoot.

How Two Pros Edit 2,500 Travel Photos Without Losing Their Minds (Or Their Weekend)
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How Two Pros Edit 2,500 Travel Photos Without Losing Their Minds (Or Their Weekend)

There’s a particular kind of dread that hits when you get home from a big shoot and the card reader is blinking at you. I’ve felt it after commercial jobs, after personal projects, and I’ve watched it paralyze photographers who simply don’t have a repeatable system. The question isn’t whether you have 300 photos or 2,500. The question is whether your workflow scales. After fifteen years running post-production for ad agencies and e-commerce clients, I can tell you the answer is almost always: your workflow doesn’t scale until you deliberately build one that does.

Stop Editing Scared: Jared Platt's Lightroom Workflow Philosophy That Changed How I Shoot
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Stop Editing Scared: Jared Platt's Lightroom Workflow Philosophy That Changed How I Shoot

I used to know photographers who would hesitate before pressing the shutter. Not because the light was wrong or the composition needed adjusting, but because they were already dreading the edit. That particular flavor of creative paralysis is more common than anyone admits, and it quietly kills good photographs before they ever get taken. When I first started moving into consultancy work after years in commercial studios, I saw this pattern constantly, especially with wedding and portrait shooters drowning in delivery backlogs.

Kill the Post-Processing Paralysis: A Landscape Editor's Minimal Workflow That Actually Works
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Kill the Post-Processing Paralysis: A Landscape Editor's Minimal Workflow That Actually Works

There’s a specific kind of discouragement that hits landscape photographers and I’ve watched it happen to clients of mine for years. You nail the shot in the field, drive home buzzing, load the RAWs onto the computer, and then just… stall. The files look flat. The shadows are a mess. The sky is blown or the foreground is a muddy void. And because you don’t have a clear entry point into the edit, you close the application and tell yourself you’ll come back to it.

Stop Drowning in Raw Files: A Pro's Breakdown of Mango Street's Photography Editing Workflow
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Stop Drowning in Raw Files: A Pro's Breakdown of Mango Street's Photography Editing Workflow

There is a specific kind of dread that hits when you get back from a shoot with 800 raw files, a client deadline in two days, and a folder structure that looks like a crime scene. I spent the first few years of my career editing that way, and it cost me hours I’ll never get back. The photographers who scale their work, whether they’re shooting for ad agencies or editorial clients, are not necessarily faster at editing.

Stop Optimizing the Wrong Things: 10 Landscape Photography Obsessions Worth Dropping
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Stop Optimizing the Wrong Things: 10 Landscape Photography Obsessions Worth Dropping

I spent the better part of a decade building systems designed to make images technically perfect. Batch sharpening actions, noise reduction presets tuned to the decimal point, resolution checks baked into every export workflow. That background in commercial studio work trained me to treat every pixel as a deliverable, and for product photography, that discipline pays off. But somewhere along the way I started applying that same obsessive standard to creative work, which is a different thing entirely.