Lightroom to iPhoto JPEG Workflow
Reading Michael Clark’s recent post on Inside Lightroom, I got to thinking about the current jpeg workflow that I developed after switching from Aperture to Lightroom and I just realized an extra benefit that I hadn’t realized when I developed the steps.
According to Clark:
One other feature I have noticed but need to look into further is that my raw Nikon D2x files seem to look better than they have in previous versions of Lightroom. It seems with the Adobe Camera Raw upgrade to version 4.3, the folks at Adobe have also improved the auto-rendering of some Nikon camera models. I’ll write more about this as I work up recent images.
This is statement demonstrates something interesting about RAW photos. Our opportunity to improve the quality of the final version will continue to get better as the technology improves. However, these changes might have unintended consequences for our work as well. Imagine a tweak to Adobe Camera Raw to improve highlight recovery. This improvement is something we would all look forward to, but then imagine that you go back to Lightroom to print some photos or burn a CD for a client and you find that all your existing photos with previous highlight recovery edits don’t look right. You may now have a better tool to process them all again, but that is a lot of extra work if you already had satisfactory versions.
Keeping a JPEG (or TIFF, if you have the room) version of your edited output is a good idea for this, and several other reasons. In my case, I keep JPEGs of all my final picks, rated 3 stars or more, in iPhoto and then export them to flickr. The main reason that I started cataloging them in iPhoto is that I gave up the tight integration with Apple’s other iLife products when I switched from Aperture to Lightroom. This way I have a manageable number of good quality work that is always available to me in my Mac applications (and even on my iPhone), but I also have an archive of the post-processing work that I did. Given improvements in ACR, I may someday go back and tweak a few photos here and there, but I can’t keep up with processing the stuff I am shooting now, never mind constantly reprocessing (or at least checking) historical work.
