Need Workflow Help

[RazorAngel]

So I'm still trying to get my workflow down for massive number of images. Here's what I have so far. I was just hoping someone could help me come up with a more efficient way of doing things:
1200+ images for a wedding imported into lightroom.

1) Go through all of the pictures once, hitting "X" to mark the picture as rejected if it's out of focus or extremely over/under exposed. This goes EXTREMELY quickly and works well for me. It's probably the most objective part of the entire process.
2) Filter out all rejects
3) Go through pictures again, this time looking for "decent" shots. That is, paying a quick glance to expressions, emotions, etc. Any shot that I feel is "pretty good" will get a 2 star rating.
4) Filter out all pictures under 2 stars.
5) Go through the 2 star pictures and identify the REALLY good shots. Stuff I can see selling enlarged prints. Any shot that I think can sell well gets 3 stars. This last wedding i had roughly 150 three star pictures

At this point I'll go through and color correct/straighten/crop/etc all 2 and 3 star pictures within lightroom. Fast and painless.

Here's the hard part and the place I could use assistance: How best to get the 150 pictures into lightroom for the "velvet glove" treatment? That is: Noise reduction, application of special actions, etc? Am I just being too obsessive about trying to doll these pictures up? Admittedly many of them are fine by themselves.

But my question remains: Even if I want to edit say 35 of these 150 pictures for super-special in-photoshop treatment... selecting them all 35 and kicking them into Photoshop slows my system to an unusable crawl.

Maybe I'm just looking for affirmation that this is as good as it gets. If anyone has suggestions for an improvement to my workflow, please let me know!

-RA

PS. I know i skip marking anything as "1 star". I guess I just assume any non-reject, non-2 star, non-3 star photo is a 1 star photo. Just a quirk in the workflow I guess.

[erisian pope]

35 full size pictures from my camera would slow photoshop to a crawl, too. My camera is 7.1mp. I have a 2.8ghz CPU and 2.5gb of ram. The more ram (memory) you have, the lessof an issue there will be with quantity, but you'll have to have a ton of ram. Beyond that, make sure Photoshop is using a different harddrive for its swap space than Windows is using (it's in the Photoshop preferences).

But I think you'll have to edit them in smaller batches.

If you use the same treatments on all pics (like your first level of basic processing) you can define an action - basically a way of recording multiple steps. Then your workflow could be (6) open 10 pics into Photoshop (7) click the "play" button for your action which does each processing step including saving as PSD and exiting that pic - do this on each pic (8) go to step 6 and repeat until all pics are done.

It's not ideal, and maybe someone has a better suggestion.

[kadac00]

I have a similar workflow...

download
Bridge - mulitple progressive rounds of adding a star and filtering until I get to "keepers"
Adobe Camera Raw - White Balance, Crop, Straighten, Exposure, Contrast, Saturation...
Any global adjustments that are common across a group (like noise reduction, sharpening) I'll apply in an action that I call from Photoshop | Image Process out of Bridge when I convert from RAW to JPG and let Photoshop automatically open and adjust one at a time.

I have seen others mention a strategy where they defer the detail work in photoshop until order time. Basically make adjustments that are "good enough" for a proof print at 3.5x5 or 4x6 or for posting to web. Then when an order comes in for something in a larger resolution, like 8x10, they'll process those files with extra attention and replace the "good enough" version before printing. That way they only focus special attention on the ones where there is a sale involved instead of doing all of them.