We hear the term ‘workflow’ a lot in photography circles these days. It refers to a reliable, repeatable pattern of actions, based on a systematic organisation of resources. In other words, a method of achieving something that can be documented and learned and for photographers working in the digital medium, it’s about minimising the work involved in processing digital files, developing a systematic approach to editing and to storing pictures : processing to ensure efficiency and speed, storage to ensure that any one of the thousands of images you accumulate over time can be located quickly when next it is needed. These post-processing workflow should also interface with similar photo-taking and shoot preparation workflows , each of which will be the subject of another Intel. When film was king, professional photographers became used to throwing away film when the number of images available on a spool didn’t match the number of photos taken: 30 pictures taken, 6 or more left on the roll, but the film needs to be processed now to meet the deadline. Even if that wasn’t so, you didn’t mix films from different shoots! Casual photographers were often surprised to find a couple of pictures from months ago (or longer!) when their film came back from the developer; even keen amateurs would sometimes leave their unfinished film in the camera until the next outing. It was bad practice then, and totally unnecessary today.
Always transfer your digital images to the computer as soon as possible. The software that comes with your camera may be excellent, but it will probably predetermine the download location for your images and the file names. I prefer to use Corel Downloader which gives more flexibility and also opens the downloaded images in PaintShopPro’s Quicklab for initial review and adjustment. Other excellent options are XnView.com (a free application with batch processing and lossless transformations in addition to powerful editing and search function); another free program, Picasa (from Google) offers excellent features, as do various album programs, with Adobe’s possible the best and most versatile. Iphoto (part of the Mac operating system) is also excellent.
Whatever program you use to make the transfer, do not transfer the images as jpg files unless there is no other option. If RAW isn’t a possibility, Tiff might be. The loss of data involved in using 8 bit jpeg files is covered in another Intel (http://www.qondio.com/do-you-need-to-shoot-in-raw).
Safety First! - After downloading and before you erase the photos from your camera’s memory card, copy them to a separate storage medium such as a CD, a DVD, an external hard drive or an on-line backup service. Only after you have a copy safely backed-up should you erase them from your memory card. Now even a complete meltdown, power surge or computer thief cannot rob you of your original photos. The only deviation you should consider from this step is if you can do an immediate initial scan to delete any definitely unwanted images before you make the backup; if you can’t do that immediately, copy the lot to an external medium.
If your camera doesn’t offer RAW files, or you have decided not to take advantage of the many benefits of RAW, skip this section. Otherwise, the first step in processing any digital image is RAW conversion. With no processing applied within the camera, conversion is equivalent to making a working copy of the negative.
Steps at the Conversion Stage - First, select the thumbnails of all photos that need to be rotated, and rotate them as a batch (if, like me, you don’t always hold the camera the same way up, you may have to rotate all for the clockwise files, then the anti-clockwise images). If necessary adjust the White Balance , then Exposure, Shadow and Brightness levels. I use Canon’s Digital Photo Pro, which allows me to save any adjustments made to an image as a ‘recipe’ and then apply it to selected files (ie, to batch process them). Recipes can be just for the current session or named and saved. Apart from speeding up first stage editing, this allows me to ensure that photos taken under the same lighting conditions retain the same colour balance, density etc.
When you are happy with your images, batch and export them as tiff files rather than as a jpeg to avoid any loss of quality due to compression. At this stage, I usually export the files to different locations depending on subject or other factors, renaming them at the same time (Subject, Location, Job, date, number).
After Conversion - Open your editor: Before proceeding with any other task, straighten the image: straightening crops the image (you can prevent this, but for the most part you won’t want to) and it is pointless to include the cropped out areas in any overall adjustments or to allow them to influence the outcome of global changes. This done, the next thing to consider is noise.
In PhotoShop or PaintShopPro, the in-built noise filters produce excellent results with good control. If your editor is less competent, consider running your files through Pure Image (www.mediachance.com) or Noise Ninja (www.picturecode.com) before proceeding. Pure Image has a free version, Noise Ninja has a free download, but it watermarks images until you license it.
If you already sorted out Levels and Curves in RAW, little fine tuning work will be necessary now, except for problem images. Attend to these first. Save copies as you work in the editors native format or a lossless format like tiff. The native format preserves edits and layers; a big advantage!
Cropping is your next step. As with straightening, cropping early prevents areas like a blown out sky from impacting on global adjustments. It is also a useful compositional technique: finding the “essential” image helps direct the rest of the edit; and if you can’t see an image in there worth the time, you can avoid wasting too much time on it! You may not want to crop, of course, but there are three key reasons that should guide you in deciding.
1. The aspect ratio set by you camera might be ideal for the subject...but not necessarily; don’t be governed by the arbitrary shape and dimensions of the frame if a different shape or length/width ratio would be better. Some photos should be square, many work better as ‘thin’ panoramas or even as a triangle,
2. There are distracting or extraneous objects or details near the photo edge, or
3. Your photo might contain something special, or even more than one standout picture. Experiment with different crops to isolate these elements and save them as individual images.
By now, the image is pretty much ready to print or display. You may want to tweak contrast, brightness and colour, or apply some special effects. Make sure you save at this stage, preferably as different version name. Your global adjustments should all be OK by this stage, but local contrast or colour adjustments might be useful. These are for another Intel.
Although your Noise removal early in the procedure may have also dealt with dust spots, they are often quite sharp-edged and may have been left untouched. Increase magnification to 100% or above and systematically pan around the entire image looking for spots and other unwanted artefacts. The Clone Brush, Healing Brush (PhotoShop), Blemish Fixer (PaintShopPro) will remove them quickly. Occasionally the Soften or Blur Tools may be needed to complete the task. You may also want to remove unwanted objects at this stage (Clone, Object Remover etc.) but that is beyond the scope of this paper.
Sharpening should always be lest till last. Do as little sharpening as you can get away with: there isn’t much that degrades an image more than over-sharpening. Again, the subject of a separate Intel.
Save the file, move it to a “completed” folder and take on the next image. Sub-folders within this “Completed” Folder should have the same names as your original folders. The names should be based what that the contained photos is all about.
A typical path to one of my Completed folders is “Photos/Family/Christmas/2008". Only photos I am going to keep go into the Completed sets. I grit my teeth and delete all the rest! Well, I do have my RAW or originals stored, remember. Any future work on these photos will now only be done on copies of them.
Retrieving Photos - Picasa and most Album programs along with my favourite editor, PaintShopPro allow me to add tags and captions to my images: they can have an unlimited number of tags, and both the captions and tags are searchable. If the image is moved to another location, that will be recorded by the album program that you used to move it, and when you type in a search term, if the file is on an external device (e.g. a DVD) the program will show you the thumbnail and prompt you with the name of the DVD on which it is stored. Obviously, that means you should standardise on one program to caption, tag and organise your collection.
Another option is to put your archive CD/DVDs back in the computer and use a thumbnail imaging program to make a “contact sheet” of photos. Print these out and put them into a loose leaf folder with the appropriate date, folder titles etc. dedicated photo database programs can do that, so can the Album and indexing programs mentioned above, including Picasa. Being able to review you collection without turning on the computer can be quite liberating!
There are other approaches to managing your digital workflow; this works for me, and perhaps will suit you as you develop your own system.
