STEP BY STEP FROM CAPTURE TO COMPUTER IN 10 STEPS

Use these pro-grade pointers on every shoot to get your images prepped for editing

1 Use a clean memory card for every shoot

This means you’ll know that everything on that card is linked to the same shoot. I use a ‘dot’ system on my cards – anything with a green dot has been cleaned and wiped, ready to use. The dot gets removed before it goes into the camera.

3 Review your images as you go along

You will naturally find yourself checking back over the images as you shoot. Remove any captures that are clearly unwanted or a mistake. Also check that the images are in focus – even with today’s technically advanced cameras, shots can be missed occasionally. If a shot is bad, delete it and move on.

5 Rename your files

As a general rule, I only rename image files if the images are going to be outsourced for processing. (If I’m going to process them myself, I rename them after processing, at the Export stage.) I have found that the Batch Rename function in Bridge is the best tool for renaming image files.

2 Confirm all your camera settings

Before making any exposure settings on the camera, take a second to check that the date, time and copyright information is correct. Check that you’re shooting in the suitable exposure mode and that there is no dirt inside or outside the camera.

4 Transfer the images from card to computer

Do this as soon as you finish shooting. My cameras write images to SD cards, so I just connect a fast card reader and manually move files using the computer’s file system to an external drive set aside for the shoot. Even though I capture both raw and JPEG formats, I only transfer the raw files.

6 Select the images you’re going to edit

The next step is to select the images to import into Lightroom. Bridge has some amazing features to help with this: I like Review Mode for quickly scanning through images and selecting any to discard. When you have a rough version of your edit, create a Collection and import them into Lightroom.

7 Keep your Lightroom Catalog manageable

Your new Lightroom Collection should only consist of strong and sharp usable images. This is an important thing to bear in mind, as Lightroom Catalogs can easily become quite large. Don’t bloat Catalogs with images that won’t ever be used.

9 Perform your edits in Photoshop

As it is such a huge and complex application, keeping things simple and streamlined in Photoshop is the best idea. Using extensions with edited images are very helpful, such as the Retouching Toolkit and colour tools such as Exposure X6. These will help keep a consistent look across a body of work.

8 Use a colour-coded tagging system

This is great for marking images that I need to take a closer look at – red means images ready for processing in Photoshop. First, I colour balance the images and apply raw adjustments, then ‘green’ them and open them in Photoshop.

10 Now export and backup your final files

Once my edited images are saved out from Photoshop, I mark them as ‘blue’ – at a glance this lets me know which files have been fully edited and which files need more work. Any images with blue tags on my storage system are synchronised with my SmugMug gallery and are backed up online.