I've started giving this a bit more thought, particularly as I can shoot in RAW. The CR2 files aren't recognised by windows but do get picked up by Adobe.

Is it worth converting all to DNG?
Any good tutorials/software for postprocessing - more correcting colour balance/brightness/cropping etc?

I have Lightroom 4 but feel I need something to help me know what to do with each photo.

How do you manage your photos? Do you keep original, copy for editing and a "finalised" version for each photo? In the same partition or set of folders? How do you name them and know what you're after?

Personally, I have each set of photosin a folder with a raw version and a folder of "final" versions within that.
The main processing I do is in ufraw with some very occasional other editing by gimp. As im not that good its about as clever as I get with photos.
After finishing with them its bung some onto flickr (as jpg) and copy the whole folder over to my nas (minus all the crap) for storage.
So its probably not much help to you but im sure a proper photographer will come along soon and answer the question properly.

If you're using Lightroom, then there's no need to keep a "finalised" version. Non-destructive editing means the original file is intact and you're just writing instructions for the app to render the image the way you want it. You can make duplicates, for variations such as black and white, or different crops, or whatever, but essentially you only ever have the one master image (some refer to it as the negative because of this).

I use Aperture, but then I tend to go against the flow with these things. My workflow is like this:

1. Take some awesome (and a lot of not so awesome) pictures.
2. Import them into Aperture. I have a preset that applies basic processing like saturation and definition on import. I also import them into an existing project, or create a new one as required.
3. Rate the images, discard the duds.
4. Rate the rated images to pick the best of the better.
5. Add keywords, titles, captions. Aperture and Lightroom make this a breeze.
6. Make final edits, retouching, cropping.
7. Upload the results to Flickr from the within the app/export to a format for sharing elsewhere.

(I often throw the exported formats away once I've shared them. I keep everything in Aperture for my own sanity.)

I have various projects under way. Anything that doesn't fit into an existing project get dumped into a generic project for sifting when I get bored.

Does that make sense? In reality, there's no hard and fast rule you should follow. Do what you think works best for you.

I don't have Lr4 yet (still on version 3), but in the Develop module it should give you all the controls you need to do things such as exposure levels, cropping, sharpening, contrast … all the post processing tools are there, and like others have said, it's non-destructive.
The original file never changes, you're writing all the alterations to an XML file and it can be undone at any time you want it to be. I leave the name as whatever I've set the camera to name the files as and only re-name them on export.
As for knowing what I'm after, I don't really understand that part of your query.
If you mean how do I know what I want the final image to look like, well, normally I have an idea when I'm taking the pic, but you can always just think "this might work" and if it doesn't, just hit undo.
(8+)

Mark

I'm using LR3 and convert from NEF (Nikon) to DNG on import. DNG can hold all the metadata I add without having to have an additional XML file. I think in this case that the non-destructive changes I make are stored in the LR catalogue.

Mark, I meant about finding the file after renaming, which Heather said to use tags.

I didn't know LR kept XML data.

Yeah, just add keywords on import and then search by keyword. You can also create collections and nest these in the app and once imported just drag the images to the new collection if you want to do things that way.

The way I work is by importing to my computer before even launching Lr, then once in Lr just navigate to the folder structure where the images are that I want to import to the catalog.
This means I don't have to launch any application if I want to lay my hands on the RAW files quickly because I now exactly where I imported them in the first place.

Mark

Also, when you have folders of pics, what do you name them as? Do you have a format for each eg date + event or yyyymmdd+event?

I let LR handle the import. Everything is stored in date of capture order and I always have a good idea of where to look for things anyway. If I don't then it is a simple search for keywords in LR, and Explorer will find the tags too. Very useful when the gf's sister wants to see pictures of her boys, as there will be photos from many occasions over several years.

Just a quick grab of some of the folders I have in Lr (is this what you meant?) …


Mark