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Digital workflow is a fancy term that describes the sequence of things you do between the time you take a photo and when you either showcase it or file it away for some future project. Why is a workflow important? In part, because imposing a specific sequence when editing your photos helps you remember to do various things—like color adjustments and noise reduction—that you might otherwise forget. More importantly, the right digital workflow helps you to preserve the best overall image quality and really make your photos pop.

Your digital photography workflow actually begins way back at the camera, when you get ready to take your picture. The key question: What image format should you use? If you are striving for the best possible image quality and you have the time and patience to tweak all (or at least most) of your photos on the computer afterwards, then I recommend using a Raw format if your camera supports it. Raw images represent the best quality photo your camera is capable of capturing. Not only does a RAW file have no image compression, noise reduction, or automatic color adjustments, it preserves the full range of colors and brightness that the camera captures—much of which is discarded if you shoot in JPEG format. Raw gives the best results, but only if you are willing to spend the time afterwards teasing it out of the photos in an image editor.

If you don't have the time to invest in optimizing all of your photos, then you can shoot in JPEG instead. Your photos won't require as much editing, because they will start out with some automatic tweaks. That said, you can still edit them if you want to, though the image files won't have quite the same potential for greatness.

This is what a histogram generally looks like, both in your camera's LCD and in software. This one comes from Adobe Photoshop Elements and is used as an example.After you take a photo, eyeball the histogram on the camera's LCD. In fact, you might want to turn on the camera's histogram overlay and leave it that way, so it's always visible when you review your photos. (Check your camera's user guide to see how to enable the histogram display.)

The goal of this histogram review is to make sure your photo has a reasonable exposure. Check to make sure that there isn't a peak at the extreme right or left of the histogram graph; a spike on the right means parts of the photo are overexposed (blown out), which, frankly, is impossible to fix. A peak on the left means that parts of the photo are underexposed, which is bad, but generally something that you can tweak. If you see a histogram like this, with no peaks at either edge of the graph, you know it's likely that there's nothing radically wrong with your exposure settings.

Now it's time to bring your photos into your computer. You can use whatever method works best for you; I like to copy the photos directly from the memory card, but you can use your camera's USB cable if you prefer. If your software offers the ability to erase the memory card when the transfer is complete, I'd recommend against it—make sure the transfer was successful before you let a program automatically format your card, or you might lose a whole set of photos. Moreover, I'd wait until you back up your hard drive before erasing the photos from the card, just to be on the safe side. I always advise folks to back up all of their image files to an external hard drive or some other backup solution (such as an online storage service) to guard against catastrophe.

Now it's time to get to work. The very first thing I'd do is to fine-tune the composition in an image editor.

It's possible, for example, that your camera doesn't auto-rotate photos that you took with the camera turned vertically. If your photo needs to be rotated, do that first. There's probably a rotate tool in your photo editing program that lets you spin a photo by 90 degrees to the left or right with a single click.

Next, look for photos that aren't perfectly level and use the photo editor's level tool to make that adjustment. In Adobe Photoshop Elements, for example, the Straighten tool lets you re-orient your photo by drawing a line that represents the true "horizon" in the image. If you have a photo of a sunset at the beach, for example, it can be ruined if the scene is tilted even by just a little.
Use your photo editing software to get rid of various minor shooting flaws. In this case, we used Adobe Photoshop Elements to show the photo rotation controls.

And finally, before moving on to more advanced editing, crop your photo. Cropping at this stage of the workflow is important because it lets you compose the photo the way you intended when you visualized it in the viewfinder. Later, when you adjust color and brightness, your photo editing software won't be influenced by unwanted parts of the image.

By now, you might be mostly done; not every photo requires a lot of Photoshop-style surgery. If that's the case, you can just save your photo and move on. But if you need to do more editing, such as exposure adjustments or touch-up work, here’s what comes next.

Now that the photo is scoped down to the composition that you intended, let's fix the brightness and contrast. The best way to do this is generally by using Levels and Curves, or the Histogram Adjustment tools, depending upon what photo editor you use.

Once the overall levels are about right, you can fix the colors. That's hard to do if the image is too bright or too dark, as that can often mask the image's true colors. Often, all you really need to do at this point is fix the white balance by dragging the white balance slider, or using the white balance eyedropper tool to pick a part of the photo that should be white or neutral gray. In Photoshop Elements, choose Enhance -> Adjust Color -> Remove Color Cast to get to the eyedropper, and then follow the on-screen instructions.

When the colors look about right, I'll sometimes return to the brightness and contrast adjustments and tweak the settings one more time until I think they look just about perfect.

At this point, you might consider your photo finished and just save your work. But check out your photo: Is there anything you'd like to get rid of? You might want to surgically remove a tourist from the background of a vacation photo, for example, or edit out a blemish from someone's face. Now is the right time to grab the Healing Brush or Clone Tool and remove those unwanted elements.

You can use your photo editing software—in this case Adobe Photoshop Elements—to edit out noise from your picture.

When everything else is done, your last editing task is to run a little noise reduction on your photo. This is especially important if you shot it at a high ISO or in a very-low-light situation. (If you have an average, low-ISO, daylight photo, you can skip this step.) You can apply any noise reduction filter that comes with your photo editor, or call on a standalone noise reduction program like Noise Ninja.

At long last, it's time to save your photo. I generally recommend saving your final version as a JPEG at the highest image quality (lowest JPEG compression level). If you want your final image to be absolutely lossless—for example, you're printing it to mount in a museum gallery or you're giving a copy to the president—save it as a TIFF. For most of us, though, a high-quality JPEG is fine.

Via:MacWorld