Beverley

Originally uploaded by Moose408

My post-processing work flow has been fairly stable for the past 6 months. This is actually a fairly long time for it to be stable as work flows should evolve over time. Well it’s time for it to evolve because I recently discovered a flaw in the flow.

My normal process was to import into Lightroom, do the RAW adjustments, crop, rotate and then move into Photoshop for the final processing, then back to Lightroom for exporting. This has been working very well, but the past few weeks I have a couple of instances where I need a different aspect ratio for the photo. My original crop wouldn’t work and the change involved a large crop. Since I had already done all my Photoshop post-processing on a smaller crop, this presented a problem.

My options for increasing the size of the photo where to either edit the Photoshop file, stretch the canvas and then paint/clone/etc the background to fill in the missing pieces. Or re-crop the photo in Lightroom, then redo all my edits in Photoshop. Neither of these were ideal.

So based on recent experience I am changing my work flow so that cropping is the last thing I do before exporting. I will do this in Lightroom on the final Photoshop .psd file, so that it can be changed easily. This should give me the maximum flexibility going forward.

We’ll see how it works.