At the beginning of my photography journey, I struggled to develop a smooth, efficient working process for Lightroom. As anyone who is self-taught will know, there’s some things you just don’t know that you don’t know.

There is no one, correct way to work with Lightroom, but this is the process that works for me, and so I hope that this post might help speed up your journey, if you’re new to using this software.

Shooting Tethered

When I get into the studio to begin a shoot, the first stage in my Lightroom working process is to set up my camera, tethered to the computer.

If you’ve not heard of this technique, it involves using a cable (I use the Tether Tools cable) to connect my camera to my computer so that as I shoot, the images are transferred right away to Lightroom and saved to my hard drive.

Sometimes you can’t see important details on the camera’s tiny screen. You might think you have the perfect shot, but when you view them later, the hero item might be out of focus, or you missed a key detail in lighting, styling or composition. If clients are on set with you, it also gives them greater visibility on what you are shooting, without needing to show them the back of your camera, which is a bit clunky.

It’s an efficient working process because all of the files are being saved to the hard drive as you shoot, meaning you don’t need to download images from the camera’s memory card later on.

Keeping track of your favourites

While Shooting

To keep yourself organised and to avoid scratching your head after the shoot, thinking ‘which one did I like again? Which image did the client say they like?’ I would recommend rating images as you go. There is a star rating system on Lightroom so that you can check off the images you want to edit as you shoot. I assign all of my ‘to edit’ images with a simple 5 star rating. (Other photographers might use different rating systems, but this one works for me.)

Post Shoot

I usually try to leave at least one full day between shooting and editing. This is so I can leave some of the emotion from the shoot behind and approach my editing with rested and fresh eyes.

Before I get into the deep dive, I take another quick, holistic look at everything I’ve shot, just to check that there aren’t any more images that I want to include in the final selection. At this stage, I’ll also delete from Lightroom and my hard drive, all of the images that are objectively bad, i.e the flash didn’t fire, the focus wasn’t where I wanted it etc.

Then, I head into the bottom right corner of the programme and click ‘rated images’ so that I can see just the images I have rated with a 5 star and will edit.

Editing

I start my editing process with global adjustments. These are adjustments that affect the whole of the image. Typically, I sort out any big problem areas first. This might be the crop i.e if something isn’t looking quite straight or feels like it’s ‘falling away’ on an overhead shot. I’ll also address the white balance if needed here, and perhaps take a look at profiles too.

I’ll then use the basic panel, tone curve, HSL panel and split toning to address tones, colours, contrast, saturation and luminance.

Next up, if there are specific areas of the image I want to adjust, I’ll use the local adjustments (Now, Masks) tool to add clarity, texture or play with shadows and highlights to really make the hero of the image pop.

When I’m happy with my image in Lightroom, if I need to take it over to Photoshop for some retouching, I’ll right click the image, select ‘open in Adobe Photoshop’ to transfer it across. The programs work together like a dream to make your life easier! Here, I might be removing reflections, extending backgrounds, editing out tripod legs or cloning out unwanted distractions. Once retouching is complete, simply select ‘save’ from the dropdown menu in Photoshop and it will take your image back into Lightroom.

I learnt pretty much everything I know about Lightroom in Rachel Korinek’s Lightroom Magic masterclass. I would recommend checking it out if you’d like to master the program beyond frustrating and aimless toggling with sliders!

A note on Lightroom and its catalogs

An important thing to know – and I wish I knew sooner! – is that Lightroom isn’t a storage system and it doesn’t save your images. It simply shows you a preview of your images, keeps track of the edits and saves your metadata. It’s important to save your images to either your computer’s hard drive or an external hard drive, and then have a back up of those files too.

When I first started using Lightroom, I made the mistake of importing all of my images into just one catalog. At one point, I had about 10,000 images in the one catalog! This was messy, hard to navigate and eventually this will start to slow the performance of your computer and Lightroom.

Create multiple catalogs to file your work instead. It doesn’t matter what exact system you use, as long as it makes sense for you. I have around three different catalogues that are broken down into the areas of photography I cover. For example, I have catalogs for food, product and personal work. Within each of these catalogs, I have folders split out by client or project.

Exporting for clients

When I send images to my clients, I use a gallery called Pixieset. It’s a great platform for presenting images because clients can see all of the images from the shoot in one place, they can select their favourites, leave comments and create sub-folders such as a ‘favourites’ list.

Even better, there’s a Lightroom plugin for Pixieset which allows you to publish images directly from Lightroom to Pixieset, saving you so much time faffing with exporting images to a hard drive and then importing them separately to Pixieset.

Backing up work

When creating work for a client, it’s super important to back up your work.

My images are already saved to my primary hard drive because I shoot tethered, but after the shoot is wrapped up, I would recommend saving all of the raw and edited files onto a second hard drive.

If you have a third hard drive that is kept in a separate location, i.e a family member’s home or an out of home studio, then I’d recommend keeping a hard drive there and doing back ups to this third one as well. That might sound excessive, but if your home was robbed and all of the hard drives were taken, all of your back-ups are gone along with your primary hard drive. Similarly, if there was a fire, or some other unpredictable event, it’s the same story.