A Better Lightroom Workflow

I recently stumbled across a better and quicker workflow in Adobe Lightroom, at least for me. First a little background and some context. I typically shoot events and weddings with two cameras. One camera (Nikon d700) will usually have a 24-70 lens. The other camera (Nikon d800) will trade off with a 70-200 and a 14-24 lens. After an event I will transfer all the images to an event specific folder on my primary hard drive. I will then use a batch renaming program that will give filenames specific to that event, plus put the images in the order that they were taken (important to have both camera's clocks calibrated). I would then import the images into Lightroom.

Let me stop here and acknowledge that there are ways to import directly into Lightroom and do the file renaming while in Lightroom, but I prefer to do it the way I described above. I am not sure there is any real difference in the time it takes to do it either way, so I have stuck with the process that makes most sense to me.

At this point I go through and do "quick" edits on all the images in Lightroom. In the past I would work on each image in the order that they were taken. I found though that what was slowing me down was bouncing around between images taken with different cameras and lenses. So I started to experiment with filtering the images in Library mode to separate the images based on what lens (and camera) was used. This grouped just the photos taken with let's say the 14-24 lens. When it came to  applying the previous edits to the next photo, I was in a flow with just those images taken with the 14-24, providing more consistently between photos and less time editing.

With my previous workflow, bouncing back and forth between the 24-70 and the 70-200 images disrupted that consistency. In the same scene of a photo shoot, edits I made on an image using the 24-70 were different than ones using the 70-200, especially if I used a radial or graduated filter. I found myself searching backwards for a previous image taken with that lens that I could apply to the image currently before me. By filtering the library of images to just work on those taken with a specific lens, I was able to noticeably reduce my workflow time, and with less headaches.

Of course this workflow only applies if you are using more than one lens when photographing an event.