KT, Hello and welcome to LL.
In all honesty this site is a great place to be exposed to all sorts of information, especially in the index and articles. Many of the contributors of the site / forums are high end artists, photographers who sell their work or work on assignments.
As such workflows vary from person to person and from image to image. Also technology moves really fast so workflows tweak too!
I have a couple of workflows depending on what I am doing.
Generally camera enhancements all off, shoot raw, modes to suit situation - tripod if I can.
Load into Lightroom 2, file convention ( YYMMDD-customtext-sequence)
There are lots of thoughts on storage structure!!!
For quick edits / general images.
There is a lot of thoughts suggesting that the more 'processing' that you can do to the RAW file the better. This opens a long debate as to what is the best raw convertor, and does it have all the process functions! In general I find for NEF files that LR does a perfectly adequate job on most general images. There are lots of theories, but just play around, move the sliders into all sorts of places and if you don't like it just hit reset or move back a few stages in the history!! Once you have a good looking image just copy the setting to similar images. Too Easy.... well it depends on your experience and eye, but from a technical point of view most people should be able to process a goods starter image to a good looking screen or general small print before too long. Not I do not say great photo, that depends on achieving a number of factors and to do so consistently does require skill in many areas.
A few key things to help and subject of many online articles are the histogram and removing any unwanted colour hues. Of course a decent monitor makes this much easier, along with tuning in the eyes that happens over time.
DXO is another rawconvertor / processor that I use - it is very powerful having lens correction tools and I prefer it to LR for cleaning up images, but it takes longer to get the hang of and use.
A more traditional workflow involves the use of a RAW convertor to provide a 16bit TIFF, with very few additional corrections made during conversion.
Tiff then opened in Photoshop. This is very generic and each stage may have several sub stages and methods depending on subject, style and photographer! The order is somewhat subjective too, but more critical when working on a TIFF, especially if using layers.
Duplicate file!!!!
Correct lens distortion, perspective, horizon etc
Initial WB and Hue adjustment if large adjustment required.
Crop (either here or at the end)
Capture sharpen
Adjust levels / exposure
Adjust tonal balance (curves)
Second Correct WB / Colour hues (some will do this much earlier and if big error, but adjusting levels, exposure and curves can alter the color balance
Noise reduction
Local adjustments to colour / tone / contrast and sharpness
Save as a Master File
Crop
Size for output
Adjust and sharpen for output
Save as a specific file.
Hope this helps, it all seems very over complex at first, and will suddenly seem to become even more complex as you start to learn that there is so much that it seems necessary to learn. But seriously just play around and if you get stuck scan the web. There is a huge amount of information about taking the technical aspects of an image from 80% to the high 90's, specific techniques / styles and if you want to make large prints that you may want to learn later , but if you have a good photographic eye just experiment with levels, curves and WB and the rest will start to come by February!!!
All the best
Steven
