How to efficiently use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for posting your photographs on blog or your website

As a Photographer I used to think that post-processing of photographs is not right thing to do and it ruins the originality of a view, place or event. Over time, I learned the importance of Post-Processing of photographs which can be used a form of art to better present the scene. Also it depends kind of photography you are doing. Here we are not to talk about Post-Processing for a particular type of Photographs, but wanted to understand the way Adobe Photoshop Lightroom can help us in making Photographs ready for your blogs or Websites. Here I am going to share basic workflow I follow to do this for my Blog called PHOTO JOURNEY.




1. After each Photo-shoot, I import photographs into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and ensure that basic Tags are applied even when I import photographs. Basic Tags like PHOTO JOURNEY, Travellingcamera.com etc are applied automatically when I import into the Library of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. 


2. Now I get all the Photograph from my Camera Card into the Lightroom and next step is to get cleaner shots and delete remaining. It's one of the best practice to keep deleting bad shots , otherwise soon you will reach the limit of your hard drive. Especially when shooting in Raw. During this I traverse through all the photographs and keep star rating them as per quality. I use Star Rating as per my definitions. E.g. - 2&3 star rating Photographs are what I process for blog. 4&5 are kept for processing later with proper diligence. Star-1 photographs remains there in Catalog, which will be checked later on the basis of their importance with respect of main event, place etc. Everyone has own style of using Star Rating and color coding in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.


3. When I am done with basic star rating and deletion in Library Module of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, next step is to filter photographs with Star Rating 2 and 3. Now only 2 and 3 star rated photographs from previous import would be shown. Now I move to Develop module to adjusting things like White Balance, Exposure controls, contrast, Noise Reduction, Lens correction etc. There are lots of presets available and at times helpful for specific set of photographs. 


4. In develop module COPY/PASTE is very useful functionality which helps in pasting adjustment from one photograph to another. Most of the times it works well for photographs from similar lighting conditions. If there is some difference, few adjustments after COPY-PASTE work well and save lot of time. 


5. When done with all the photographs, I come back to Library module and recheck 2-3 rated photographs to choose best set of photographs on some parameters. Which set shows a story in best possible way and I try to avoid similar shots/views in one story. Finally compile a set of 10-15 photographs which are enough to tell a story about a place, event or anything else around us. 


6. Make a Collection in Lightroom and rearrange the photographs to better sequence the photographs.


7. Select all and Click Export Button in Library Module, which provides various options like Resizing Photographs, Adding Watermarks, adding some sharpening for Prints or Screen etc.


8. I select a location for exporting photograph of size ranging between 550 pixels to 750 pixels on longer side of a photograph with 72 DPI. With this I also apply watermarks with some back-shadows to them.


Finally I get small sized JPEGs with proper watermarking and Tag associated inside them. All these Photographs are uploaded to my blog and in similar manner you can start using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to ready photographs for your blog or website. 


Can you gues, how much time all these steps would take for a Photo-shoot of 250 photographs? Please leave your comments and we shall discuss it further.