Jun Week 1 → Documentation II
Retouching Day 1
The 93 RAW photographs from 22 May needed to be properly retouched before going to the online expo. Last week the documentation session went well in terms of capture, but RAW files always need development work afterwards: white balance, exposure, colour correction, and selective adjustments. This week I spent the first few days setting up a workflow in Lightroom Classic before processing the photos in batches.
the workflow
The photos are sorted into three groups by paper type: white (Arena), black (Sirio Black), and silver (Splendorlux Metal Argento). Each group has slightly different needs, so I built the workflow around that division.
The trick was figuring out what to sync across all 93 photos versus what to handle one by one. Lens correction and noise reduction could be synced safely. Crop ratios could be synced and then nudged individually. White balance had to be done per paper group, never as one global sync — silver and black papers have no clean white to sample, so I took references from the corrected white-paper shots and copied only the white balance setting to the others. Selective adjustments like the fluorescent saturation and the warm-table mask had to be done by hand on the affected shots.
Once this logic was set up, the actual editing moved quickly. The first day was slow, the rest of the week was efficient.
The main issues to solve were:
Fluorescent colours: the auto white balance was thrown off by the large areas of saturated colour, especially orange, which pushed several shots toward blue. RAW lets me reverse this completely.
Silver brushed metal table: in some shots, the table picked up a warm cast from indirect afternoon light. Where only the table was warm and the white paper was already neutral, I used a mask to cool the lower part of the frame without touching the poster itself.
Silver paper series (five shots): the paper had a slight physical curve that Lightroom's perspective tools couldn't fix (those tools assume a flat surface). These need to go into Photoshop with Warp later this week to flatten the top and bottom edges.
The scratches and ink stains on the metal table stayed. They fit the working-studio quality the project is built around — if I had wanted a flawless surface, I would have used a scanner. The slight imperfections in the surface and the prints are part of the visual language.
Around 60–70% complete by 1 June. Fluorescent green and the black-and-white posters are all done. The silver-table warm correction worked. Still to do: fluorescent orange fine-tuning, final crop and straighten passes, the five silver-paper warps in Photoshop, and one final export — sRGB, 8-bit, screen sharpening, long edge around 2000–2560 pixels for the online expo.