Processing all the pictures I’ve taken in Seattle is tough since I have such affection for all of them. In the end they must be filtered, so I sift through them. First I mark out to “keepers” of the RAWs I take (most of the pictures I take are unprocessed). This gives me a high level guide on how much time to spend per photograph. Next I convert them from RAW to JPG format, taking the non-keepers from 16 MiB down to a much more manageable, archiveable 2.5 MB. The keepers then get the special attention, as they deserve the fine tuning to really make them pop.
An exception to this process is what I do for panoramas. For those each of the RAW images have to be processed in the same way and combined together, which I do in darktable and hugin respectively. Here’s an example panorama using that process:
Another overview of Diablo lake
For this particular picture I’m happy to have spent the time processing all those respective images (there were five photos stitched together to make this one). Unfortunately you can’t preview how the panos look beforehand, so what this does to my process is create a bunch of extra work. I need to get better at that by really appraising the vistas first instead of snapping away so much!