iPad Pro M1 Photography Workflow
Target Audience
This workflow is mainly targeted at people like me who do photography very frequently as a hobby or very small side gig. The main purpose of this workflow is to be as simple and frictionless as possible while also maintaining a solid backup of all your images. Just like the gear, my workflow is always changing and adapting to reflect my current approach to photography, the devices and software I am using and my own reflection on what is important to me with regards to a simple, secure and easy photography workflow.
Gear
2021 iPad Pro M1 12.9”
2TB SSD
4TB HDD
USB C Hub
2 x 256gb UHS-II SD Cards
Software
Lightroom CC + 1TB Adobe Cloud Storage
Affinity Photo
Apple iCloud Photos
Photo Library
All my files are stored in the cloud with the option to either store the full size originals locally or just proxies which is useful if I don’t have much local storage or the files are not from a current ongoing project. I would organise my library in the following way:
Country / People
Town / Person / Event / Shoot type
Now the obvious question is what happens when the 1TB of storage gets full? Well first of all I only store the client photos in the cloud for a month or so just in case I need to do some last minute changes. After that I remove them from cloud and only store them on the back up drive, but I will get to that later in the video. As for personal photos, well I am strict and only keep photos that I like and that I think are good and might be used for something later down the line. Everything else gets deleted. Eventually even this will fill up 1TB however as of now I have 1000 photos in this library and only using about 40gb of space. So it will be a while before this gets full and when it does, i will just upgrade to 2TB. By that time the price would have come down more too. As for the local iPad storage, I can always remove the full size photos from the previous year later down the line once I’m finished with them and only keep the proxies stored locally for preview. I can even remove certain projects from the cloud entirely as they will also be kept on another drive. But I will explain that later.
Importing
Importing is very simple, I just insert the SD card into the reader and import directly into LR and into the album I want to store the photos in. I always leave the store locally check box on so that the files are stored on the device as well as in the cloud.
Culling
Once imported, I will go through the images and select the ones I don’t want by using the reject key All the images that are rejected will then get deleted. The second round of culling will involve me applying one of my presets and maybe doing very basic exposure and crop edits to see if the photo has potential or to select my favourite from a series i kept. Anything which I don’t like gets deleted.
Editing (Lightroom)
Before doing anything else, I switch off True Tone. Too many times I edited a photo to then find True Tone switched on to then have to re-edit. Anything that gets through to this stage will be edited either from scratch or from using one of my presets as a starting point. Once the basic editing was done, I move to the next step which is to rate the photos. I would rate between 1 and 5 stars and they would mean the following:
1 - Rubbish delete
2 - Acceptable (only keep if it supports another image)
3 - Good photo
4 - Great photo
5 - Some would call this a banger. 10 a year I’m happy
Editing (Affinity Photo)
Any image that is 3 stars and above I might bring into affinity photo if I need to clone something out or fix something. To do this I click share, then click ‘Open In”. However before doing that, it is important to change the export settings to 16 bit uncompressed TIFF. Once in Affinity I will fix any issues and then export as a full size TIFF back into LR. Don’t forget to add it back into the album as for some reason it doesn’t do it. Also if you have photoshop instead, then this process is 100 times easier and more seamless. I just prefer Affinity Photo personally.
Exporting
Once the photos are finished, I would typically give myself a short break from the screen, come back with fresh eyes and if still happy, i would export the final images to the iCloud Photos app. Just like with the previous export setting, we need to change them to make sure we are exporting at the best quality possible. In this case we will use JPEG at max size and resolution. You will only have to do this once btw and LR will save export settings for next time.
iCloud Photos
As well as as the Adobe Cloud Library I also keep an iCloud Photo Library. The main difference is that the iCloud library only has the final edited full size JPEG images as another form of backup but mainly to easily view and share. This library is only for personal work and I’ve done away with breaking it up by year as the app does it automatically, I just break it down by country then location or event. I have over 2TB of iCloud storage so space is not an issue. Now and then I will browse through the library if i want to share things from the past or maybe get some inspiration from previous shoots.
Backing Up
That is where the 4TB HDD comes in. On the HDD i will make the same folder structure as I have in LR. I will then export the images from LR to the HDD but i will export them as DNG RAW files. This not only preserves the RAW data of the image but also all the edits that were done to it. This means that if i were to open this file in any Adobe application such as LR or Photoshop on any device, I would get the RAW file and all my edits. Plus because it is not confined within a library, it means that if one file corrupts, only that file is affected…. Not an entire library.