Innershell Design Lab

I have been asked by a few people about my workflow. So in this page, I will share with you my workflow. I won’t give you the exact settings I use because that is a matter of taste and style.

1. All my photos are shot in RAW. This gives me the maximum flexibility to adjust white balance or change my exposure by a stop or two.
2. Download all my photos off the camera and preview them in Google Picasa software. Google Picasa is free and gives you some basic image editing options.
3. Through the Picasa photo browser, I preview and permanently delete the rejects.
4. Then I use the Straighten tool to align the images to the horizon or vertical reference points.
5. And finally, I use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” tool, which does a auto-contrast, auto-color, and white balance corrections. I can already visualize most photographers discrediting me for using this tool. Oh well..
6. My final step is to export all these RAW images to JPEG. Select all the images in Picasa and use the Export tool and keep the images in their original sizes.
7. Now pick a few photos that you like for post-processing in Photoshop. This is where all the magic begins.
8. Use the Unsharp Mask filter to increase the sharpness of the image. Remember that when shooting in RAW, the camera does not automatically sharpen your images.
9. Duplicate the original layer and use the Lens Distortion filter to add vignetting. I use maximum (all the way to the left) and then save. Then I use the layer’s opacity to adjust how much vignetting I want.
10. Add a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer and tweak to your liking. I bump up the contrast just a hair.
11. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and tweak to your liking. When there are very few colors in the photo, I desaturate my photo. When there are lots of colors or a strong contrast between color groups, I increase saturation to exaggerate it.
12. Add a Curves adjustment layer and tweak to your liking. My curve is a very very mild ‘S’ shape to bring out the shadows.
13. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Ensure that the colorize checkbox is selected and then tweak to your liking. This is the adjustment layer I use to either coldify or warmify my pictures.
14. You are now done. Open the Save for Web dialog, adjust the image size to something small and reasonable then save. I save it as a different file name so that I always have the original.
15. Upload to your favorite website and brag about your work.

When all is said and done, I spend about 2-5 minutes per photo in Photoshop. I’ve noticed that I was doing the same thing over and over again, so I created an action script to do all the work for me. It takes 1 second for Photoshop to run all my ‘default’ actions and then I go in and tweak the adjustment layers here and there to my liking. Hope this was helpful for you.