This is the NFGphoto workspace, at its cleanest and least cluttered. It’s rarely actually like this, and certainly for very short periods when it is.

I run a Windows 7 PC, with a quad-core i7 and 16GB RAM. It’s pretty quick, and I use an nvidia 980Ti video card to help with the graphics processing. I use four different graphics apps in my daily photo workflow:

Capture One for RAW processing
GIMP for editing and retouching
PaintShop Pro for batch processing
FastStone Viewer for browsing photos

As you can see, one of the monitors is rotated ninety degrees. When working with my RAW editor of choice, Capture One Pro, it uses a vertical menu that’s very long. If there’s not enough room, the tools will each collapse when not in use, but that’s an extra click every time so I spin the display and get 1920 vertical pixels of toolbox. The same benefits apply to any app with tools in a secondary window, which is most of my apps. The image below is a screenshot of both monitors, running Capture One:

And here’s a close-up shot of some of the tools I use. The menus can be configured any way you like, so no two workflows will be the same.

Once I’ve finished with the RAW edits, I shuffle the rendered images to GIMP, a very poorly named editor with some very powerful tools. I do all the cleanup and skin smoothing here, its almost limitless customisation makes it incredibly speedy once I’ve set it up the way I like it.

For the high-res finished images, that’s the end of the process. If I’m working on the proofs from a shoot, the next stage is running them through a batch processor. In this case, I use Corel’s Paint Shop Pro. Until I started using GIMP, PSPro was my editor of choice. It’s old and fast but it’s been resting on its laurels since Corel bought it, so I can’t really recommend it anymore. But it has a great script editor.

And finally, for general image browsing, I use FastStone Viewer. It used to be quicker before I started asking it to deal with 36 megapixel JPGs, but I haven’t yet found a replacement that works the way I want, so I stick with it.