Digital Imaging Workflow | Photoshop Articles

Tuesday 07 February

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The Eyes Have It.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them. - Diane Arbus

My Life

Buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner. ~Author Unknown

Winter Fog

I can't sing, I can't paint and I can't write how I feel, so all I have left is photography to express myself. - Anonymous

A Time To Reflect

Some of us cynics say that "the quickest way to make a million dollars in photography, is to start with two million dollars". - Anonymous

Mother & Child

A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

Feild Sunset

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man. - Edward Steichen

Keep Focused!

One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photo out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photo out of focus are a style. ~Author Unknown

Fun In The Grass

"You don't take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it." - from a Pentax ad.

Changing Face Of Photography

I always thought good photos were like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isn't that good. - Anonymous

Fruit Picking In Mexico

Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn't a very interesting photograph. If it were, they would have more to say. ~Author Unknown

Coca Cultivation - Colombia

I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature. ~Wynn Bullock

The New Picasso - Brazil

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Each one of us forgets different things, a photo may change its meaning according to who is looking at it. ~John Berger

Digital Imaging Workflow

Images are 'pre-scanned'
For the photographer who's been shooting and scanning film for reproduction, shooting with a digital camera is great: all your images come 'pre-scanned.' This saves the time you spent waiting for the processor, waiting for the film to dry, editing rolls and rolls of film, paging it all, and scanning the selected images. On the other hand, for those of you who are shooting slides, dropping the film at the lab, and giving the selected slides to your clients, shooting digital makes you the processing lab. This can add a significant amount of time to each assignment.

Overwhelming volume of images
In either case, shooting digital has some disadvantages. First, there is no film as a backup. If the hard drive crashes, or the compact flash card is unreadable, everything is gone. (This is like having the lab run all the film through the wrong chemistry.) Second is the problem of editing all those images. It’s not reasonable to open them one-by-one in Photoshop, not if there are 300 images from one assignment. Third is the question of keeping track of the images so they can be found again next week, or next year, or even further down the road. Complicating all of this is the sheer volume of images -- it's like trying to drink from a fire hose. Because of the nature of shooting with a digital camera, it's very easy to shoot several thousand images per week, all of which need to be edited, captioned, archived, and made available to clients. The good news is that with a well-designed workflow, the digital monster can be tamed.

Determining user requirements
The first thing to do is to decide in advance exactly how the digital images will be used, both now and in the future. When Wake Forest hosted a presidential debate in October 2000, I had the good fortune to borrow a then-new D-30 digital camera from Canon. I expected to shoot film for the majority of my assignments that week, and use the D-30 to shoot occasional feature images for the web. Instead, after one look at the image quality from the camera, I ended up shooting more than 1500 digital images in under 3 days, and relegated film to a backup role.

A new category of Digital Workflow Applications came into being in late 2005 with the release of Apple’s Aperture program, which allows the photographer to download, edit, process, print, make web galleries, and catalog all of his or her digital photos. Adobe quickly released the beta version of Lightroom, an application with very similar features. Initial reviews of Aperture were mixed, but Apple has a history of creating great software (see Final Cut Pro). Lightroom is still in beta, and won’t be released until late 2006, but it will be available for both Mac and Windows platforms. I have worked with Lightroom, and been impressed with the general feel of the application.

Photo Mechanic can rename and caption a group of images all at the same time. Any digital assignment results in lots of images with the same caption info - there might be 20 images of the university president speaking at graduation, 50 of the commencement speaker, 10 of her getting hooded, and 30 more of the procession. PM can batch-rename groups of images with useful filenames, and attached real caption information with all the IPTC fields (byline, dateline, caption, lots of other stuff.) All of this information is permanently attached to the file, and is available under the 'File Info' window in Photoshop. As of version 4.4, Photo Mechanic adds IPTC information within many RAW file formats on both Windows and Macintosh computers.

In my workflow, I use the Ingest function to download my photos from the memory card to a folder on my hard drive. While they are being Ingested, the photos are renamed and captioned, and copied to a backup folder at the same time. Note the extensive use of variables in the Ingest and IPTC Stationery Pad (the variables are in {} brackets). After ingesting the card(s), I open the Contact Sheet, add any additional caption information to specific pictures that require it, and start looking at large previews to decide which images are worth keeping. These are Tagged, and the rest are sent to the Trash Can.

A Word About Captioning
Why caption everything? It's not just to be able to identify the subjects, although that's important. Digital images end up everywhere - all over the internet, on CDs full of printed images, on the hard drives of people everywhere. The IPTC captions should give the end user information about who shot and who owns the rights to the image, as well as contact information. Also, since the images can exist outside of the local filing system and without any printed hard copy, it's important to have complete information about the contents of the image attached electronically. There is no time better than when the images are first downloaded from the camera: every hour reduces the amount of information that can be added to the file.

No more CDs
I used to burn each assignment onto CD-R media and file it along with the job paperwork, just like film assignments. No more. Since all my assignments are now shot digitally, I save my pictures on hard drives, in folders with the job name saved inside a dated folder for each day. One hard drive is in the photo studio, on a server that I can access from anywhere with a high-speed connection. The other hard drive is in the Creative Services office, in another building on campus, accessible through our campus ethernet system. I back up all my digital files to both servers for ease of access and security. One advantage of this system is that our staff designers can have read-only access to one of the servers, so they can see everything I shoot very quickly after the assignment is complete. Finally, I keep an third set of backup drives off-site.

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