Ok, you’ve done your shoot.  Got ALL you photos on a card or two.  Now what?  What is your post production process you use?  What’s your next step?  I have my process that I’ve used that works for me.  Here’s a list of basics that work for everyone.

  1. Back-Up – before I do anything I back up my shoot/images onto another drive.  I don’t breathe until I know everything is safe.
  2. RAW – I always shoot in RAW and before I do anything to these files I make sure I’m safe and backed-up.  Usually I upload everything to my AWS Glacier cloud storage.
  3. View – Next thing I do is view the images, make my adjustments in Capture One or Phocus.  Make sure everything is good to process.
  4. Process – I process the whole shoot to tif and then organize those files into folders for each set-up.
  5. Web Gallery – If I’m doing the shoot for a client I make a web gallery with Adobe Bridge.  Set up the gallery and send the link to the client.
  6. Edit – IF no client I start my editing process.  I have a simple way of doing this.  I create two folders… rejects and good.  Then using Adobe Bridge I go through the shoot and move the images into the folder they belong to.
  7. Rejects – I usually keep the rejects for a bit of time, but eventually trash them.  
  8. Finals – I take care of my final choices and start me retouching & color correcting.  Use them how I need them.  Social, websites or for fun.
  9. Storage – I keep my final tifs on 3 drives!  2 or RAIDS and one drive I call a vault.  The vault drives are in stored in my storage unit.  I’m paranoid about losing my work so I’m extra careful.
  10. Organized – I treat my Vault RAID’s like filing cabinets.  Everything is organized into folders, color coded and alphabetized.  I then log them into NeoFinder so I can find anything I need at anytime.
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