Photographer Shares His Lightning Quick Lightroom Workflow

Scouring through a huge number of photos and editing all of the ‘winners’ can be a tiring task, especially when you consider that one day may consist of hundreds or even thousands of photos. A great workflow can help significantly expedite that process, and fortunately for us, pro photographer Nick Fancher has chosen to share his.

When it comes to working in Lightroom, Fancher has gotten his process down to a science. It’s not perfect (he’ll be the first to admit that) but it has enabled him to meet the sometimes staggering demands of his JackThreads job. Using this workflow, he can turn 500 initial images into 100 finished images in less than an hour — a process he claims would take him ten times as long if he was using Bridge and Photoshop.

We’ll let Fancher walk you through his process in the video, but the TL;DR version goes something like this:First, use the right bracket key to thin the number of initial images by giving the good ones one star and sorting by star rating. Then, start from scratch and completely edit the first image of each set that was taken using the same lighting, and then apply those settings to the remainder of the set. Finally, go through and tweak those settings on the rest of the images to get each photo right.

He speeds up the process in the video, but even if it were shown in regular speed, he seems to work through the 400 images from this one photo shoot (three lighting scenarios) in no time at all. As we said before, it’s not perfect; but as with the Dodge and Burn tutorial from yesterday, if you don’t have a quick Lightroom workflow established, this’ll be a great place to start. (via Fstoppers)