Digital Workflow

Last night I finally developed a digital workflow that seems to work for me.  I have been shooting in RAW + JPEG since I got my dSLR in Dec of last year and really wasn't making the best use of my RAW photos and hadn't learned how to use ACR (Adobe Camera RAW plug-in for Photoshop) or how to configure iPhoto to open a RAW file directly in ACR for editing.

It took me a lot of playing around to do this, including searches on two message boards (Two Peas in a Bucket and The Photo Forum) and some reading in Photoshop CS3 for Dummies by Peter Bauer so I will share what I figured out here in case it helps anyone else.

To configure iPhoto to open a RAW file directly in ACR for editing: 

1. Click iPhoto, preferences from the top menu bar
2. In the General tab, select "in Adobe Photoshop CS3..." from Edit Photo drop down box
3. In the Advanced tab, click the check box for "Use RAW when using external editor"

Since I already have it set in the general tab that to double-click a photo magnifies the photo and doesn't edit it, I just highlight the RAW file I want to edit in iPhoto and hit enter.  Now, it opens automatically in ACR.

Workflow:

1. Plug in camera (still need to get card reader), download photos to iPhoto, autosplit to events by date, group together for trips, etc. do not rename photo files
2. View photos in iPhoto and determine which ones need to be edited for further use; open as above for editing in ACR
3. Edit in ACR to correct for exposure, brightness, saturation, crop for distracting background elements, etc.
4. Click Open Image and save the file as JPEG in Photoshop
5. If any additional enhancements are necessary in Photoshop, save as TIFF or PSD file (I haven't figured this part out yet) and do additional editing in Photoshop, then flatten and save as JPEG

As I said, this is the first time I have really tried to figure out a disciplined flow, so if anybody has any comments on this, I would appreciate it.  I did edit a handful of pictures from Christmas Day this way last night and will be working on putting them into a digital scrapbook layout today.