Editing portraits, Lightroom

Lightroom 4 is my main editing and cataloging system.  I do get a lot of questions about editing and workflow so I thought I would address that in a post.  You can view some other editing posts HERE.

So here is how my workflow goes:

-After a shoot I come back to my office and immediately upload the RAW images from the cards to an external hard.  I open up a new catalog in Lightroom for every client.  That way I don’t have to search through different months or several categories to find images of a certain client.

-Lightroom pulls all the images onto my MacPro from the external drive and I go through and “5 Star” all the ones I want to keep.

-Next I filter by “5 Star” ranking and apply some presets to the images that I created and adjust clarity, vibrance, saturation, vignette, etc.  I also have the option to take a “5 STAR” to a “4 STAR” during this pass.  I try to get the number of images under 100

-Finally I export all the images as full size JPEGs with a “low sharpen” from Lightroom onto a folder on my desktop.  That folder is copied to a drobo drive and also travels over to Sallye Anne’s iMac where she takes over with orders, final edits, and lab adjustments.

Here is a recent “Before and After”shot of 2013 Senior, Leila.

The image on the LEFT is out of camera RAW and imported into Lightroom

The image on the RIGHT was edited with the following:

Clarity +9

Vibrance+38

Sharpening Amt to 44

Highlight Priority Post-Crop Vignetting -15

Export as JPEG

The version on the left looks great to me but I love a warmer look with a little more “punch” and clarity like the edited version on the right.

Great light+ great makeup+beautiful senior=less editing time!!

This is how I would crop and post the image for blog and web use.  Feel free to leave some comments or questions.  Thanks