Your Lightroom Develop Panel Workflow

I'm curious about how people work themselves through the Lightroom Develop Panel.

What's your develop panel work flow? I think Lightroom was designed so that you basically go from top to bottom in the develop panel?

After import, mine goes something like this (for now, until people enlighten me):

1. Auto Tone and Auto WB (I should probably consider doing this automatically upon import)
   
2. double click Exposure to reset to 0 (I usually find my exposure in camera was fine, but Auto Tone will decrease the exposure settings)
   
3. adjust Highlights, Whites, Shadows and Blacks accordingly for detail
   
4. increase Exposure if necessary
   
5. Curves adjustments, according to taste
   
6. Camera Calibration to achieve blend of colors I'm looking for
   
7. revisit WB
   
8. Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation adjustments
   
9. Chromatic Abberation adjustments
   
10. Brush adjustments
    
11. Crop
    
12. Post-Crop Vignetting if desired

Mine varies a little bit but let me try to compare it to yours.

- Exposure adjustment, if necessary. OR, one of the B&W presets, depending on the image.
- Cropping. Usually very early in my process.
- Lens corrections, if necessary. Shots with the 14mm always get the profile, other lenses occasionally get manual adjustments if I need to "square" up the lines.
- I usually try to get WB as close as possible in the camera, usually by a gray card, sometimes by the in-camera presets. I don't think I've ever used Auto WB in LR. If I didn't, (for instance for a stage show where the light is changing) WB is near the top of the list.
- Adjust highlights, shadows. Sometimes whites and blacks, not every image. Contrast, Clarity, Saturation, Vibrance. All eight of these sliders get worked together, really.
- Re-examine Exposure, adjust if necessary.
- Brush and spot edits. I do a LOT of these, maybe half of all my images have brush or spot edits, and some of my images have dozens. I do almost all my portrait edits entirely in Lightroom.
- Noise reduction and sharpening, usually minimal adjustments here unless I was really pushing ISO.
- Split toning panel, if applicable for that image.
- Effects panel (grain & vignetting)
- Re-evaluate crop and lens adjustments, adjust if needed

I very rarely use the following:
- Auto Tone. I often shoot a lot of low-key shots, or other shots where the histogram is very heavily weighted to the left, so Auto Tone rarely works for me. I'll sometimes click it just to see what happens, observe what it changed, then Undo. It usually pulls my Contrast way down, which I don't want at all.
- Curves panel. I can usually get the toning that I like with the eight sliders, though I'm sure I would do well to learn to use the Curves panel better.
- Chromatic aberration, unless I've applied a lens profile
- Lens profiles for lenses other than the 14mm
- Camera calibration. Probably should use this more.

Interesting. This type of feedback could be very informative and educational.

Your response gives me some additional thoughts that I'll edit in the original post if I get a chance to tonight. I'll respond more to yours later, too... as I have some questions. I'm just at work now, so I can't put all my thoughts down.

I don't know about the "modern" techniques that are being presented, but back in the "old days" at least for beginners, doing a "top down" approach in the Basic panel was the "conventional wisdom".

Now, maybe it's just because I've been doing Lightroom "forever", I almost don't even thing about it, but yeah, getting the Exposure right, getting Highlights and Shadows right, a bit of Contrast and Clarity, a bit in the Tone Curves if needed. Another control that I like is to "tweak" the HSL (largely luminance) to get blue skies the way I like them.

I do moderate sharpening, and if needed Masking and if needed Noise Reduction. Oh, yeah, and a crop comes pretty early on if needed.

Lens correction if needed.

The thing about Lightroom (and other Raw processors) is that the "order" of your adjustments is only meaningful as to how it affects your "perception" of the final outcome, nothing is actually changed in the Raw file.

Oh, and I've never messes with the "Auto" adjustments in the Library module, not that they wouldn't be, umm, interesting!

One other note: My workflow is quite different if I'm doing a standalone photo, vs a photo in a set that I want to be consistent.

When I'm working a set, most of the time I'll do most of the process to one photo in the set (not necessarily the first, most likely my favorite), then sync all my changes to the rest of the photos in the set. Then, the rest of the photos in that set will generally only need cropping, local adjustment, and maybe an exposure adjustment if I change my light placement/power. Not counting selection/culling, a set of ten takes about twice as long as a single photo - definitely not ten times as long.