There are a thousands of tutorials and tips on retouching and post-production out there, so it’s pretty hard to find new things worth sharing. Here’s one I use on all my photos:

I call it Creative Quarantine. It’s not a fancy technique, but a strict policy: Whenever possible, I do not publish (or otherwise send off) images the same day I retouch them.

All my retouched photos go into quarantine for about 24hrs, usually meaning that I have got a good night’s sleep between looking at the close-to-final image and actually finishing it. What this does for me is giving me some distance, staring at and working on an image in Photoshop for hours doesn’t exactly improve your perception of it. Go to sleep. Eat something. What I noticed is that often I would spot areas that look overdone – lower that opacity a bit. How come I missed that spot yesterday? – heal it out. Uh, that skin softening looks just a little to gaussian – you get the idea.
I suggest you try this the next time you get all excited about that gorgeous photo that you can’t wait to get some feedback on. Don’t rush things.

Following the example of Chase Jarvis, I picked up the habit of taking more photos. With my iPhone.

Feels kind of like running around with a digital Holga – OK, it’s not that awesome, but it smells the same. I also “retouch” my iPhone shapshots (but only using native iPhone apps, no Photoshop involved), because I believe that retouching is part of the creative process of making the image.

You should try it!

Update: Looks like the iPhone is becoming the overall most popular camera on flickr…

I’m a Linux and free software enthusiast. I’m a photographer. Therefore, I tried to get an efficient and professional workflow going under Linux from importing images from my camera, reviewing, organizing and retouching them to publishing. As of now, I don’t think this is possible under Linux. The best I could get was digiKam. It’s a fairly nice piece of software, but doesn’t cover the needs of a (semi) professional photographer. And then there are the issues with running Photoshop CS3 under Linux (the WINE people are working on it though…).

My current solution relies on dual-booting Windows for Bridge and Photoshop (I don’t use Lightroom). Here’s a description of my current setup:

• aileen – Headless server
  
  • Gentoo Linux
  • Two 500GB external harddrives
• gentop – Laptop
  
  • dual-booting Gentoo Linux and Windows XP
  • running Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3

The two external drives are encrypted using TrueCrypt and mounted at aileen:/mnt/backup/{master,slave}. Whenever I’m done with processing a shooting, I sync the disks via rsync to get a redundant backup. I didn’t use any kind of real software RAID.
aileen also runs samba, so I can easily access the master disk from gentop‘s Windows installation.

So, when I get home with my camera, I boot up Windows on gentop, fire up Bridge and have it import the images (converting them to the DNG format) and save them to Z:\photos\archive\YYYYMMDD\ (Z: is the network drive connected to samba on aileen). Next I set Bridge to Vertical Filmstrip mode and apply my labels and ratings in a “binary rating system” as described by Katrin Eismann in one of the video tutorials that come with Photoshop CS3.
When I’m done, I look at the highest rated images first and start the retouching. I have to admit that most of the times I just skip Camera Raw and take the image straight to Photoshop, because I don’t like how the development settings are handled in Bridge/Camera Raw (no easy way of saving multiple sets of settings or to see a complete before and after).
After doing my Photoshop magic, I save the PSD file as YYYYMMDD_title.psd to

• released\ – if it’s some artwork I’m going to post here at my web site
• client\doe_john\ – if it’s work for some client
• private\ – if it’s a private piece that is not going to be published anywhere (yet)

at Z:\photos\.

Now I can finally reboot to Linux again (my Windows environment has nothing but PS and Bridge – no IM or eMail – to keep me focussed). To upload the finished work I mount the external drives on gentop using sshfs.

Done! Thanks for reading, I hope this can help you to further develop your personal workflow to make it more efficient and fun. =)