Post-production workflow comments welcome

[Abitconfused]

What am I missing here?

1. Crop & straighten
2. Lens aberration or distortion adjustment and light falloff, apply Style if desired
3. White balance (cooler or warmer Kelvin color)
4. Exposure (using histogram) adjust black and white points using white & black sliders or Levels as required (Dehaze?)
5. Use Curves to adjust contrast
6. Use gradients to selectively adjust brightness on a distinct layer
7. Color balance… desaturate distractions, brighten subject of interest as appropriate
8. Apply Clarity (midtone contrast), Structure (texture) locally
9. Creative vignette
10. Sharpen globally or locally (mask)

[xpatUSA]

What am I missing here?

1. Crop & straighten
2. Lens aberration or distortion adjustment and light falloff, apply Style if desired
3. White balance (cooler or warmer Kelvin color)
4. Exposure (using histogram) adjust black and white points using white & black sliders or Levels as required (Dehaze?)
5. Use Curves to adjust contrast
6. Use gradients to selectively adjust brightness on a distinct layer
7. Color balance… desaturate distractions, brighten subject of interest as appropriate
8. Apply Clarity (midtone contrast), Structure (texture) locally
9. Creative vignette
10. Sharpen globally or locally (mask)

What Editing software, Ed?

I anticipate that folks will rush to tell you what's wrong with individual steps or their ordering rather than answering the question.

[Manfred M]

What you are missing is analyzing the image to see what it needs. Going through a "cookbook" approach is going to give you boring images that have no outstanding features.

For example, your point 1, crop and straighten is not useful if you are using a Dutch tilt in your workflow.

Step 2 I almost always do, but in conjunction with removing chromatic aberration; easy to do when you are working with the raw convertor, devilishly difficult at other stages of the PP work cycle.

Your step 3 is something I do at raw conversion, but tweak as my image develops.

Your step 4 and 5 I do both as my first steps to get a good output to the pixel based editor, but these are also something I do again as some of my last steps.

My first step is to examine the image to understand what work it needs.

My second step is to apply global changes during the raw conversion process (your steps 1 - 5) so that I get a solid product to pass on from my raw convertor to my pixel based editor. All those steps take me no more than a minute. I rarely crop at this point, as I don't know if I will need parts of the image, which is output dependent. Input sharpening occurs at this stage; it may or may not be global. If it is not, I will do this at my stage 3

My third step is work on large areas of an image; sky, foreground, etc. which might include your steps 5, 7, 8 and 10 (but not necessarily in all cases. In many images I never use gradients, clarity or structure at this area / zone stage unless the image needs it. I might do some local sharpening or reduce sharpness, as required. I usually spend no more that 4 or 5 minutes doing this. This is also the step where I do major surgery; straightening, cloning and healing).

My fourth step is to make adjustments to small local areas, generally dodging and burning, possibly some saturation control (desaturation) and local sharpening as required. This part of the process can take many minutes to many hours. Saturation control is usually not the whole colour range but just one or two individual channels (I might desaturate the blues and cyans in the sky, for example. An image may stay in this state for hours, days and sometimes even weeks or longer.

My fifth step is to fine tune contrast (global and mid-tone) and finalize the brightness globally. I might do a bit of tweaking on the colours and this is the stage where I would colour grade. This gives me my base image, that I will save.

My final stage is preparing the image for output. This will include cropping to size, resizing and sharpening for the output I am looking for. This is where I will change the bit depth and colour space, if required. I work on a copy of the base image and throw this out when I am done.

[Abitconfused]

Very good advice thank you!

[DanK]

I think the best advice is one of Manfred's comments: the starting point should be what you think needs to be done to a particular image to make it what you want. There are some things I virtually always do--e.g., adjust midtone contrast--but much of what I do is idiosyncratic, based on the particular image. For example, I almost never find it helpful to use a gradient, although I do with a few landscapes.

BTW, clarity is not midtone contrast--or, to be more precise, it's not only midtone contrast. it's a combination of midtone contrast and what is usually called local contrast but that is more closely related to sharpening. To bring out texture, I generally start with the texture slider, which affects smaller areas than clarity (it's between clarity and sharpening in this respect) and doesn't seem to adjust midtone contrast.