Creative Workflow

From CreativePro.com:

Workflow is not a traditional photography concept. The idea came into the photography world alongside Photoshop's rubber stamp tools, the Raw format, and the practice of shooting more pictures in an afternoon than film photographers used to shoot in a month.

Film photographers do have workflows, of course; they just don't describe them as such. But making contact sheets, circling selects with a grease pencil, choosing to process some images by hand and send others to a lab, developing elaborate notations for describing processing instructions -- they all constitute a workflow.

In the digital realm, workflow is a bit more complicated because of the higher volume of images and our higher expectations when shooting digital. When it's possible to keep, search, and sort everything, we think that we should keep everything, and have it all accessible. Since we can create a perfect, lossless image backups, we demand the ability to do so. (In the film world, backup was costly, time-intensive, and impossible to do without a quality hit.) All of these expectations, along with all of the vagaries of digital image editing, mean that photography workflows are now often more complicated than they were in the film world.