LR + CS2 Workflow Question

scottV

I've been using LR successfully for a few months now and have been generally happy. Out of any given set of pictures that I take I usually have only a handful of keepers that I would like to polish in photoshop. Recently I have been shooting more and have found the need to mostly tweak the levels in PS on 50 to 100 shots at a time. Currently, I edit a copy from LR, make the necessary changes to the psd and then later export a jpg from LR to upload to smugmug. It seems a bit wasteful having so many 40+ mb psd files sitting around that really only have about 5 minutes of work in them. Soooo now after I export the finished jpg I have been importing it back, stacking it with the original, and then deleting the psd. This is cumbersome to say the least. Does anyone have any better suggestions to handling this? For 99% off my shots I would be happy with just having the raw files and jpg with the adjustments.

scottV

argh, meant to post in finishing school, can a mod please move?

pathfinder

Done.

LiquidAir

Why use levels in Photoshop rather than exposure, blacks and brightness in Lightroom? They do essentially the same thing. These days the only time I do adjustments in Photoshop is when I am using some form of mask.

scottV

Yeah, I started doing the adjustments in LR after I posted this and thought some more about it. LR makes it so easy it seems like it is too easy to overdo some photos and introduce a lot of noise. That is mostly unnoticeable in the SM display versions... I will try it out for a while and only PS the super special shots.
thanks

arodney

Do all the heavy lifting of tone and color in Lightroom. Its going to be faster, produce better quality if rendered correctly and in many cases, more control due to the high bit, linear encoding of this data. Work top down, left to right. That means using the Basic Tone controls first, curves for small tweaking. There are actually two tone mapping areas in LR: Basic then curves (hence the differences in the Histograms). With a bit of practice, you should be able to handle 90% of all the necessary tone wok in Basic. Don't forget Clarity which is a Midtone contrast bump. Very useful! I think you'll find that soon, you'll limit the Photoshop work to all non global, pixel editing tasks. LR does the global stuff faster, with more precision and with no data loss. Then there's the ability to copy and paste the metadata instructions to the other 99 files in a split second.

LiquidAir

I am definitely pushing my workflow in that direction as I get a better handle on what all the controls in Lightroom actually do. When I am planning to do some local work, say dodging some of the shadows and burning the highlights, I have come it seems best to do the shadow recovery in Lightroom because that is the operation which is most noise prone. So I error on the side of pushing the midtones too hot in Lightroom and then locally readjust with masked Curves layers in Photoshop. Does that seem like the right approach?