The Funny thing is that I still love working with RAW files to start with, and the first processing I do is always de-noising an image. Even when I'm almost certainly sure that I'm heading for a coarsely grained result, somehow I like to start with a picture with least amount of noise. It's just like preparing a white canvas.
Once de-noising is done, now it's time to make a mess on a canvas. Exposure, contrast, white balance, curve, highlights, shadows, blacks, whites, clarity, vibrancy, saturation and so on. Although I just listed the whole right column of Lightroom, I usually do use 3-5 of them on each photo. However, after all, these careful fine tunings, I usually end up turning it into BW then add grain or using VSCO preset to it. Probably it's a right time to say, "Why the fuck am I doing this?"
In the end, my goal is to have a photo that I like to look at. How I get there is entirely up to me as it seems so easy to lose myself in the pool of digital tools ...
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