This is going to be a fairly long post by the sounds of it.

Ingestion
You may call this importing, getting the pictures from the camera or, collecting. I call it ingestion because that’s the program I use for the task. It’s called Image Ingester Pro 3. It’s a fairly straight forward program with an amazing capacity to be expanded to your specific criteria. You can download from half a dozen cards at the same time and upon import, all of your files get metadata and tagged so you don’t have to go in individually.
Metadata is the information stored in your picture like creator, location, copyright information, etc. Your camera adds metadata such as camera model, lens, date, time, aperture, shutter speed and so on. I can choose where I import to and what it’s called as well. I rename all of my files on import to Kerr_YYYYMMDD_0001.nef. I use my name, followed by the year, month and day, to easily find the images by date and then the original file number used by the camera. You might notice that I also use the original RAW extension as well, I convert to .dng later in the process.

Outtakes
After the Ingestion I open up the folder that I ingested it to (see the file structure above) in Bridge and start checking out the pictures for the first time. I have 5 ratings that I commonly use. The first is the green label. It tells me that this photo can be deleted and is no good. Second rating is blank, nothing to the label. Not a good shot, but something that I might use or could use. The third, fourth and fifth are star ratings 1, 2 and 3 respectively. One star is cool, two is edit this and three is wow. I don’t use the 4 or 5 star ratings because I’m using them for client choices or just when I need to expand my ratings. Once I’m done rating I add keywords backups of my ratings so that I don’t lose the rating. I do this in the form of MK:One Star, MK:Neutral (Initials:Rating). The initials just keep everything together in the keyword clouds.

Conversion
Here I’m just opening the files in Camera Raw (ctrl or cmd + R in bridge) and re-saving them further down in my workflow as .dng (Adobe’s Digital Negative format). I don’t change the filename other than the extension (.nef to .dng). The files get saved to the archive portion of my hard drive and stay there.

Catalog
Why don’t I use Lightroom from the beginning? All of the programs that I’ve used above were designed specifically for that function. Unlike Lightroom, which is designed to do all of the above, I find it doesn’t complete these tasks as well or fast enough for my liking. Although, it is possible to do most or all of the stuff above strictly in Lightroom. I use the program for cataloging only. I import to lightrooms catologs that I’ve created specifically for that shoot or that client or even as broad as the genre of the pictures. Once this is done the files never move on my drive again.

Export
I go through the final images that I’ve picked out (1 or 2 star rated) and pick a few here and there to do some post-production on in Photoshop. I export the files to a different hard drive so that my originals and my derivatives are on different disks. I export as a .psd at 300 ppi and add the new file back to the catalog so that when I look at the original file in Lightroom, a copy of the derivative is right next to it for comparison.

Post Production
Not much about post production can be said here. Save lots and always use a tonne of layers. I can go through in a future post about my workflow in Photoshop if there is enough interest.

Backup
I use a couple of programs and ways of backing up my data. First off is Microsoft Synctoy 2.0, I use this to duplicate my original files on to another drive. I also use it to copy all files to my networked server that’s running 1.5 terabytes of space.
All in all I have a 500gb drive for originals, 500gb backup of orginals and a 320gb for derivative. All of the originals get backed up to DVD and stored seperately from my computer. All of the above gets backed up to the server twice. Yes, it goes on the server on two different drives in case there is a drive failure there.

It may seem like a lot of steps and even more trouble than it worth. But believe me, if I had followed this workflow, I would have the images here in this post instead of somewhere in my array of computers, memory cards and hard drives.  A couple of resources for more stuff like this is The DAM Book and the forum online as well as the Image Ingester site.