7 Steps for a Faster Lightroom Photo Editing Workflow
By: Paulo Makalinao
Tags: Work, Editing, Photography, Creativity, Art

If you just got off a portrait session, shot an event, finished covering sports, or got back from days and days of vacation, you probably have anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand photos you have to look through. You can spend days and days editing and sorting through photos in Lightroom, and that’s why today I’m going to give you tips on saving time in the photo editing workflow. Besides things like learning to use shortcuts, here are 7 steps for a faster and more productive Lightroom editing experience.

#1. Get it Right in Camera First

I understand this is a really big no brainer, but seriously, it’s worth taking the time to consider. Getting things right in camera is essential to speeding up your workflow later. You’ll spend less time having to tweak small mistakes and therefore finish a lot earlier than normal. Here are two examples of things you need to get right in-camera that are going to boost your workflow when you import your photos into Lightroom.

First, get your exposure correct as often as possible. Use your exposure meter to know if you’re getting it right. Check your photos every once in a while to make sure you aren’t getting too off your mark. It’s totally fine to chimp every couple of bursts just to make sure you’re hitting the exposure right, just don’t do it too often where you may miss a shot! If you’re shooting on mirrorless with an EVF, this will be even more convenient as you can actually see what your true exposure is going to be. No chimping needed. I know that in Lightroom, the exposure slider is just one on of many, but if you can spend less time fiddling around with it by getting the photo right in camera, the more time you can save.

Next, get the leveling of your image right. There’s nothing more tedious than having to rotate images in Lightroom. Today, most cameras have gyroscopic sensors that can be activated and shown on the back of the camera screen or in an EVF, telling if you are level or not. Even when not using this tool, it’s important to check things like horizons and other horizontal lines to see if they’re aligning correctly across the frame. Like with exposure, if you can spend less time trying to rotate your images, the quicker your workflow becomes. The bottom line for this step as whole is just to be a bit more mindful and maybe a little less spray and pray if possible.

#2. Use the quick collection and other organizing tools

Lightroom is not just an editing tool but also a cataloging tool. I don’t get too in-depth with my cataloging, but what I will always do is use the quick collection selection by pressing F on a photo. Before making edits or maybe after just a few quick edits to know how your photos will generally look, go through your entire set of photos, picking out the best ones. These should be the preliminary photos you plan to use or send to clients. Don’t spend too much time dwelling on a photo. If you like it, add it to the collection. You can always remove the photo later if you don’t like it or find it redundant.

The quick selection also puts all your best photos into one convenient folder for you and will allow you to quickly batch edit and export all of them when you need to. Most importantly, the quick collection tool will help you refrain from having to edit every single photo and just focus on the ones that matter. Usually, I take anywhere from 500–600 photos on a portrait shoot. The first time I go through them, I put around 100 in the quick collection. I probably remove a few and end up with around 70, but the selection process allows me to spend less time editing unneeded, poorly shot, or redundant photos. There are definitely tools you can also use to put desired photos in their own specific folder per shoot, but I’ve found that quick collection selection is the best for my workflow. Use whatever works for you at the end of the day whether it’s quick collection or a rating system with stars.

Putting all the best photos into a singe folder

#3.Create and Use Presets

Utilizing presets has many, many advantages. I used to be naive enough to think that every photo deserved its own special love and care when it came to all the settings. This might be important when shooting landscapes or when you come across a very, very special image you took, but for the most part, creating and applying presets is more than worthwhile with hundreds or thousands of photos. Presets also allow shoots to have a similar feel and vibe with each photo. It’s important in the final album that all photos have a sense of commonality to them. Presets allow you to have a consistent style, and a consistent style is the forefront of good personal branding as a photographer.

Onto the process of applying them, after importing my images, the very first thing I do is make a preset for the shoot. You should be making your own presets, but why you should be doing that is an article for another time. Back to the point, even if it takes a while, creating the preset for a set of photos is worth the time investment since this will be applied over and over again.

Usually, I already have presets made for specific types of photos like for sports or performances or portraits. I will take this preset that I made previously and tailor it to the new set of photos. I make sure to save the settings as their own separate preset when I’m done making changes or save them into some “burner” presets I always allow to be changed.

Here are a few good rules of thumb. If certain photos all have similar lighting conditions, they should all get the same preset. If, for some reason, lighting changes drastically throughout the shoot, the preset should be modified to fit this change, or a new preset should be made. If I went from shooting an event from the outdoor to the indoor, each location will typically get its own preset. But, if I shot the entire time outdoors for a portrait shoot and the sun got a little lower in the sky, it’s worth it to keep the same preset and modify it. Usually, in this scenario, where the sun gradually changes, all I really find myself changing is the white balance. You’ll be surprised just how useful adjusting the white balance can be in getting photos to match.

Generally, presets should be applied after putting items into some special category like a quick collection. However, it might also be understandable to apply presets before you make specific selections as a preset can be the difference between a so-so photo and a great one. You might not know how good a photo can be until you’ve seen it edited. It’s important, however, that if you want to see how each photo looks with a preset, that you proceed to do the next step, batch editing.

Utilizing pre-made presets I have and adjusting them to a shoot

#4. Batch Edit

To make presets the most effective, you should be batch editing. Batch editing allows you to refrain from having to apply your preset to each and every photo. In Lightroom, this can be done by going into the library section, making sure you’re in grid mode (G). Highlight (holding down shift and dragging with the mouse) all the photos a preset will be applicable to. On the right-hand side, you can choose a saved preset, pick the one you want, and apply it to the highlighted items. Your computer is going to need time to process heavy presets on a lot of photos, so this might take a bit of waiting. But afterward, all your selected photos are going to be modified to the preset.

A few reminders. After batch editing, skim through your modified photos just to make sure everything looks consistent. Remember, I mentioned earlier that presets need modifying every once in a while to ensure that the final album looks consistent. If a string of photos is looking off, apply the re-modified preset with a batch edit once more to that specific grouping of photos.

Applying a Tennis based preset to a group of photos.

#5.Only Adjust Certain Things at Time

At this point in the workflow process, you’ve already applied presets to your quick collection or selected images, but of course, your photos are not yet perfect. Now is the time you can go through each photo one by one after narrowing down the good ones. With portraits, for example, I need to do a lot of retouching, clearing some face blemishes, whitening teeth, and brightening eyes. Sometimes I also still need to crop and realign photos that aren’t perfect.

But don’t be making all these adjustments to one photo and then continue to do all the same adjustments to the next. Do only certain adjustments at a time. For example, on my first pass through, I might need to dodge certain parts of a face with my adjustment brush. I will do this to every photo that this needs to be done before doing anything else. I proceed to repeat the process, but maybe this time, I only brighten teeth, and then I go through again and maybe only crop and rotate. Lightroom will keep whatever module and settings you used active as you progress through your collection of photos. So it makes sense to keep applying whatever this module is doing. By not having to switch between modules and module settings, you’ll be a lot faster in making small, minute changes that need to be done to every photo in specific areas.

Sometimes I need to soften certain areas of someone’s face. I apply the brush to a photo and then continue to apply the same brush to subsequent photos since the tools will stay active.

#6. Clear any Distractions and Listen to Something Passive

Now, for general tips that will helpful for the previous five steps. It stands to reason that if you aren’t looking at your phone every five minutes to see your notifications, you will be more productive and more efficient in getting work done. Clear yourself of distractions while you edit. Find time for yourself when you know that no one is going to bother you or at least not bother you too much. By allowing yourself to just work, you’ll eventually get into a flow state where your actions just feel fluid and quick.

Of course, editing photos in silence can be quite boring. Make sure you listen to something passive like a podcast, someone’s previous live stream, or music (or maybe you like dead silence; that’s fine too). You might not actually remember too much from these things, but they act as a nice white noise or maybe a great motivator. I really stress the word passive because, again, you don’t want these things to distract you too. These should be relatively easy things to listen to where you don’t have to give too much mental capacity in understanding what they mean. Editing your last shoot is not the time to be learning differential calculus, but it may be a good time to listen to an hour long podcast of someone talking about how they had a life-changing trip to Thailand.

Music or long form content like uploaded live streams and podcasts are great to listen to!

#7. Take a Break!

This is one of the most important things. Even with all these steps, if you’ve shot hundreds and thousands of photos, it can still take up to hours to get through every photo. Take a break for half an hour. Read a book. Watch a YouTube video. You’re far more productive when your brain is in the right place than trying to drill through everything with a slight headache. Breaks are incredibly important and can actually boost your productivity even though you’re not working during them.

Sometimes I find that I don’t quite know what a photo needs to make it really pop. I can struggle and struggle to try to figure it out, but it doesn’t always work. Taking a step back, taking a break, and looking at it with fresh eyes later is a much more pleasurable experience. Whenever I come back from my break, I can figure out a solution almost instantly. My choir teacher always told me, “You can find what you’re looking for with a clear mind.”

Clear your mind when you get tired!

Of course, these steps aren’t perfect. This list is certainly not complete. But I guarantee that if you take the ideas from this article, they will be useful in cutting down your editing time and making your workflow much more productive. They might turn a four-hour-long editing session to a two-hour one, which means you have more time to do other things that matter in your life or get back out shooting again. The key takeaways from this are really to get things as right in-camera as you can before you edit, automate your process as much as possible, and employ positive work habits like taking a break!