What do you do to get into the PP zone?

[Rachellebee27]

Once you've uploaded the pics and catagorized them, what do you do?

I tend to grab a drink, and maybe turn on some music, usually something that will relax me, like right now it's Christmas music, everything from Bing Crosby and WHAM to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Then I run a sharpening, brightening, saturation and contrast boost action written expecially for the shoot on most of the images. I generally then rotate and recrop those that need it (working hard on nixing this one) , and then start giving indivual attention to images that stand out to me.

[JustKat]

I usually get up at 4:30a.m., get the coffee going, feed the cats & dogs(who are now programed to my time clock), get Photoshop open, go back and get the cup of coffee then sit down to about 2 hours of PP without any phone or customer interruptions.
BUT...I have recently been told that this is not a good way to work as caffine can strongly distort the way we see color!!!! This is not good because without the caffine I won't see anything but the insides of my eyelids .

[Jonathan Consiglio]

Sounds pretty right to me. Yourworkflow seems to make sense. For me I do sharpening last.. Even after crops I do In Camera RAW. I must have read that somewhere a while back. If I do selective editing on any of the photos, I statr over with the RAW form of that image, and go from there. I don't like opening a file once it's been processed. Especially if sharpening was applied.