Saving As A Master Image

[rpcrowe]

A "Master Image" is an image that has been edited with initial RAW input sharpening, color adjustment, brightness control, elimination of any extraneous objects (such a lead in my dog portraits), straightening, plus dodging and burning. In fact, all editing EXCEPT final cropping and output sharpening. I prefer to save this image as a Photoshop PSD file but, any lossless file such as PNG or even TIFF could work...

The advantage of this workflow is that I can go back to the image at any time and crop it the way I need it and then apply output sharpening for the final product.

The simple extra step of saving the image as a Master Image can save time and work later if the image is needed in a different cropping.

As an example, I had just completed the Maltese Rescue California 2018 Calendar. As usual, I had included images of the various breeds of small dogs that we had rescued. However, the president, the vice president (my wife) and the board of directors told me that they preferred the 2018 calendar to include only Maltese.

I was able to go back over previous my Maltese Dog portraits and select 13 images (cover and 12-months). The images already had virtually all of the editing done except for the final cropping and the final output sharpening. It was just an hour's worth of work instead of many hours of editing to "reinvent the wheel" Since these files had not been cropped, I was able to crop them in the way I needed...

The Master Image system has saved my bacon many times

[DanK]

If you do your core editing in Lightroom, you can accomplish much the same thing, without any storage space, by saving snapshots at different editing points. One could use virtual copies as well, but I like seeing where the snapshot is in the editing history.

[NorthernFocus]

Am I alone in seeing the irony of this post showing up in two copies?