A lot of people ask for tutorials in various situations, and while I have tried to create (and will continue creating) a variety of different tutorials, at the end of the day, most of my tutorials follow the same, basic process and workflow.

Below, I’ve listed most of the steps that I follow… however, I don’t follow EVERY step in EVERY photo. You will need to know your way around Lightroom & Lightroom masking features, and know how to mask in Photoshop in order to follow this tutorial. 

Generally, the workflow is:

• Adjust White Balance in Lightroom
• Slight Global adjustments to lower highlights and raise shadows
• Remove fringing if needed
• Maybe change HSL if there are strong greens
• Selective editing in Lightroom using radial filters to:
  • Brighten the dog
  • Add clarity and texture to the dog
  • Work on the eyes as a whole, catchlights separately, darken pupils if needed
  • Remove colour casts
  • Lower distractions in the scene, eg., bright highlights, too dark areas, too colourful areas and so on
• Moving into Photoshop as a smart object, creating a New Smart Object via Copy
• Doing any “fixing”/tidying up with clone stamp, healing spot brush, composition changes (generally not cropping in yet unless very sure!), fixing/brushing over bright highlights and so on
  • Any kind of blur effects (rarely used, but sometimes to make the bokeh a bit “melty”)
  • High pass filter for sharpening
  • Bring in other layers to make a panorama
  • Copy & Flip background if needed
  • Content aware fill, content aware crop, etc (rasterised version of our original layer needed)
• Shape the light using curves layers, depending on the original light direction, where the dog is looking, and composition of the image
• Colour grading using selective colour layers, maybe a gradient layer
• “Finishing touches” which could but must not always include:
  • Gradients on radial to create separation from the background
  • Dodge and burn/contouring using curves layers
  • Remove colour casts on the dog
  • Fix distractions eg., too much saturation in areas
  • Adding more contrast
  • Adding more drama
  • Adding overlays
• Save and return to Lightroom to check the histogram and make sure I’ve used the whole light range (unless it’s a specifically dark and dangerous photo)
  • Raise exposure a little if needed
  • Add denoise if needed