Has anyone among you, used or heard of a very good and precise book to learn the proper workflow when developping raw files in Lightroom 3 (or should I wait a little since Lightroom 4 should be out some days soon ?)

No I haven't sorry Marie and I doubt one would exist to cater for all users of it as each person has varied different ways to do things. Someone will tell you of a good book now......

In short, while a book can give you good pointers and best practice methods, you really are just better off getting knuckled down and trying and experiemnting with your own workflow that is efficient and productive for you style, skills and requirements.

Get grafting girl.....

:-))

I don't believe there will be much difference in the workflow options between LR 3 and 4.

Do you have any specific questions?  Are you speaking about managing files or processing images in the Develop Module?

Hi, Steve,

I love Paris in the rain, rain, rain. In fact, I would kill right now to be there shooting in the rain. Gimme Paris... gimme rain.

Lightroom. Just go in the straight order as it's laid out and of course skip whatever you don't need to tweak. Also... I go back and forth all the time... and back and forth again. Don't overthink it unless you are doing massive amounts of editing (weddings, events etc.) and then I would go to the LR site and find their online Workshops.

Hope that helps and Good Luck!

Hi Steve,

One of the best suggestions that I can make for LR "developing" is to avoid the auto setting and pretty much the whole "Tone" section under "Basic".

My generalized work flow in the Develop module is to:
1. set color temp if developing in color or set Tone to Black & White if developing in b&w
2. set tonal range using the Tone Curve tool
3. adjust color balance or b&w sensitivity using the color sliders
4. adjust cropping
5. make customs adjustments using the Clone tool, the Graduated Filter and/or the Brush Stroke tool
6. I have import presets for Detail specific to my 2 digital cameras and my scanner. If needed I adjust the sharpening, etc under Detail
7. finally I added any vignetting or grain or Lens Correction desired

Hope this helps.

To me the key to LR is to avoid the "Basic" section as much as possible except for Color Temp & B&W.

Yes I do Marie.

I would make one observation, I think you should try and be clear what you want to achieve in your images, firstly in camera and then later in processing.

I would always advocate to try and get the image in camera as close to your expectation of the image you want then...

in processing stage also have a very clear aim and prognosis of what you may need to do to the image before you actually start manipulating.
I thing you should evaluate the image on the monitor and spend time diagnosing what you think you should adjust, make a list then apply the most appropriate methods to achieve the aim. Afterall you probably spend lots of effort adjusting the view, composition, focus, DOF in camera - procesing shouldn't be any different to your work ethic or treated any less.

Clyde's workflow sounds familiar to approach many folk make, kind of methodical applications if they are actually required.

And remember, you sometimes don't have to make any or very little processing adjustments if you have evaluated no requirement. Don't be lead into believing some have to be made.

JP

Hi I use a slightly different standard workflow from Clyde and I use Capture NX (Nikon)

Adjust white balance (rarely)
Noise reduction
Colorpoint (selective editing of contrast brightness and saturation) occasionally
LCH (luminance and hue)
BW conversiona as a transp[arant ovberlay to increase contrast
Sharpening (rarely)
Brightness vignette
Retouching (rarely)
Setting the horizontals and verticals
Crop

As a reference tool I have found the books by martin evening (eg lightroom 3) both comprehensive and useful. I could not imagine myself 'reading' them but I can dip in and out to find alternative methods. I borrow from the library rather than purchase. This is the link to booksales on amazon.co.uk

Good evening Clyde,

Hello John,That's exactly what I"ve been trying to do for some time now, not always very successfuly though. But I have a lot to learn !And I like this so much very close to what I aim when taking a picture :Thanks a lot, 

That's the thing... you can always change your mind. If you're really digging into an image you should continually adjust and re-re-re-adjust to get the balanced blend of elements you like.

I start with the crop... as for me it's like setting the table and I often go back to that intermittently as the image develops but it's difficult to apply a good delicate vignette without having the crop up front or close in mind.

Also, my color workflow is far different from my B&W conversions. I always (pretty much) begin fine tuning my White Balance and the color sliders get more work... especially with my Food Photography. As John said the goals will have big influence on the procedure. B&W (Street)  to Food are quite different.

Willem, thank you very much, I agree with this I'll have a look at that, wil probably be quite useful ! I don't have a kindle Raymond,  nothing against those e readers, but I simply like the "feeling" (touch) of the book ;-)

Right, so much right ! I have experimented this vignette issue quite often !That's a far more delicate problem, I'd say everything becomes quite different then, but so enjoyable even if we don't succeed right away, a good B&W is so "gratifying" !I think I'll have a close look at that, one aspect of photography I don't know anything about !

Here's a good example...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21847753@N02/6738321433/in/photostream

I played with that image quite a bit with tired eyes... very tired eyes and now I see the White Balance is slightly off. When I get a chance, I'll need to go back and cool it down a little bit more and correct the greenish Hue. So, with Food the color tweaking gets a lot more attention... to say the least.

Anyway... that stuff's not even a thought when doing B&W or other general color work. Here, I may or may not have some latitude but getting it just right can be a big, big deal.

Nice looking Macaroons... ?

I've just seen that one , even before you sent me the link !

As successful as I feel I can be with the B&W approach that I detailed above in my LR workflow, I really don't use it much. I still am addicted to Nik Silver EFEX. I do a basic tone curve in LR and almost always go straight into Nik from there.

In Capture NX2 I´ve assembled a couple of ´standard´ workflows that I can select., with the option tot switch the different steps on/off  and to change the settings of the various steps. That makes it quite easy

Marie,

Hi Willem,

Hello Phyllis and everybody,

I'm not sure whether it's been mentioned because I haven't read the whole thread, but I think the best in-depth guide to Lightroom is not a book but the video series by Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schwee. I used the LR 2 one and it was really really good. Best bang for the buck ever, as with everything Michael produces.  

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/videos/lr3.shtml

Thank you very much Nicolas, I'm ready to try different books, ebooks and video to improve my post processing !