Help me improve my 'workflow'

Please

At the moment I shoot Raw and jpeg, i come home and have a look at them with windows picture viewer, pick a few i like and edit the raws a little bit with ACR, mainly just brighten, darken. Not sure what else to do with it tbh.

Then i pick a couple of those maybe and open in PS which i sharpen. Or i'll open a couple in LightRoom and put some presets on it.

The way i see it i'm

Using Photoshop to sharpen
Using LightRoom to apply presets
Using windows viewer to view them
Using ACR to brighten/darken RAWs

Surely i could be doing it a lot smarter than that!!

Using the above method also means i keep all of my photos, even the really rubbish ones (probaby 80% ) so a way to delete them incorporated would be good

I like the interface of Lightroom, but don't think i'm using anywhere near its potential, with my limited time now to spend taking photographs i would like to 'streamline' as much as possible.

Any help will be greatfully received

Theres been a lot of threads about workflow, read through them.

You can do everything you have listed in Lightroom.
Watch some Lightroom tutorials on you tube or read on hear.
Import, rate and reject then edit all in one package.

Lightroom and ACR (if they are the compatible versions) have the same Raw developing tools, and Lightroom has some other goodies thrown in to speed things along. Maybe if you spent some time in the Develop module to do what you currently do in ACR, you would not need ACR as an "extra step". Photoshop can easily be accessed from LR for the special needs that only PS will meet, but LR can do a whole lot that may make even Photoshop needed only occasionally.

My workflow:
1) Shoot
2) Download cards onto a Hyperdrive on the drive home (card reader with a laptop drive inside). That way I have the images in 2 spots, both the cards the the drive.
3) Load the images from the drive onto the computer into their own folder.
4) Import image folder into LR.
5) Use LR to,
a) make color corrections
b) cull the good from the bad
c) adjust exposure
d) output tiffs
6) Bring tiffs into PS for image correction.
7) Imports tiffs back into LR to use various presets.
8) Export images as both full-size jpegs and web-sized and sharpened jpegs.
9) Burn the whole folder to DVD.

BigStig wrote in post #9795992
You can do everything you have listed in Lightroom.
Watch some Lightroom tutorials on you tube or read on hear.
Import, rate and reject then edit all in one package.

tonylong wrote in post #9796031
Lightroom and ACR (if they are the compatible versions) have the same Raw developing tools, and Lightroom has some other goodies thrown in to speed things along. Maybe if you spent some time in the Develop module to do what you currently do in ACR, you would not need ACR as an "extra step". Photoshop can easily be accessed from LR for the special needs that only PS will meet, but LR can do a whole lot that may make even Photoshop needed only occasionally.

Halliday wrote in post #9798435
My workflow:
1) Shoot
2) Download cards onto a Hyperdrive on the drive home (card reader with a laptop drive inside). That way I have the images in 2 spots, both the cards the the drive.
3) Load the images from the drive onto the computer into their own folder.
4) Import image folder into LR.
5) Use LR to,
a) make color corrections
b) cull the good from the bad
c) adjust exposure
d) output tiffs
6) Bring tiffs into PS for image correction.
7) Imports tiffs back into LR to use various presets.
8) Export images as both full-size jpegs and web-sized and sharpened jpegs.
9) Burn the whole folder to DVD.

Thanks for comments, will definitely read up on it as it sounds perfect for everything i do

My workflow

As one who has Lightroom sitting on a shelf waiting to be installed (no time to install recently). Also not having a usable workflow due to lack of decent tools, I will be establishing a workflow that I can actually use, this may be a dumb question but....
Why convert to TIFF files?

who me? wrote in post #9855708
As one who has Lightroom sitting on a shelf waiting to be installed (no time to install recently). Also not having a usable workflow due to lack of decent tools, I will be establishing a workflow that I can actually use, this may be a dumb question but....
Why convert to TIFF files?

The tiff format is a "universal" image file format that has two quality levels -- 16 bit and 8 bit but is not compressed as is a jpeg. The 8 bit tiffs can be read and processed in pretty much any image editor. The 16 bit tiffs can be processed by some apps such as Photoshop while retaining more image data.

If you are shooting in Raw and need to move from a Raw processor such as DPP to an external app such as Photoshop, you will need to take one of two approaches: if you are using Photoshop CSx you can transfer the image directly into Photoshop initially skipping a "save a tiff/jpeg" step, or for any editor you do a Convert and Save to create either a tiff or jpeg so the external editor can open and process the file with all the DPP/Raw edits applied.

You should know that each Raw processor only "reads" its own Raw editing, which is why you can't make adjustments to a Raw image in, say, DPP and then open the same Raw file in Photoshop Camera Raw and see those edits applied.

If you are shooting in jpeg, there is also an advantage to saving a tiff copy if you plan to edit it: each time you save a jpeg the jpeg software performs a new conversion with at least some compression at whatever level of quality/compression it is set to. It is pretty common when you are getting started to find that an image that was in the beginning a high quality jpeg to, after a few saves, has all of a sudden become a low quality shot. So, good workflow is, once you open a jpg image into an editor, do a Save As and save a tiff for editing uses.

My normal workflow is to do as much Raw processing as possible (I use Lightroom) and then to go into Photoshop only if an image needs something my Raw processor can't provide. I tend to prefer avoiding the large tiff copies if I can!

I have virtually no use for tiff files. Images that get significant editing are saved as psd files.

tonylong wrote in post #9856211
...My normal workflow is to do as much Raw processing as possible (I use Lightroom) and then to go into Photoshop only if an image needs something my Raw processor can't provide. I tend to prefer avoiding the large tiff copies if I can!

I agree. There are just some fixes I can do better with PS and my wacom tablet then I can do in just LR. I do try to do as much in LR as possible thou.