D I G I T A L   W O R K F L O W

When digital photography came along, the old ways of doing things changed drastically. No more chemicals, enlargers and safe lights. No more photo finishing labs. No more filing cabinets of slides and no more negative sleeves and contact sheets. Things didn't get easier, but boy, did they change. Instead of darkrooms, we now had computers, hard drives, scanners, monitors and calibration tools. Oh yeah, we also had databases, Photoshop, plugins, web browsers, and about a ton of other types of software.

Out of this change came a new buzz word: "Workflow."

When I first started looking at digital photography as a replacement for my film rig, I quickly stumbled onto this magic phrase. It was written and spoken almost with reverence. No one really seemed to know what it was, but it was becoming the holy grail of photographers everywhere. Forget the pixels, the one question that everyone had was, "what the hell do you do with the images once you have them?"

One thing I found out quickly is that most workflow descriptions are written by photographers who shoot for clients. Their workflow was designed to get the image from capture to the client as quickly and as efficiently as possible, often with the client looking over their shoulder. For me, that wasn't going to cut it. As a fine art photographer, my concern, once the image had been captured, was to get it stored, protected and cataloged. Once that was done, I could concentrate on doing whatever work on the image I wanted to do to get it ready for sale.

Once I understood that workflow was not a single, seamless process, I developed a three part workflow. The first part, capture workflow, covers my process for handling the images immediately after capture and also accounts for times when I am shooting on the road. The second workflow, process workflow, is a less well defined process that I use to process images once I decide to display them for sale. The third workflow, output workflow, is what I use to prepare an image for final output, be it a print, web image, whatever.

These workflows, just as they are, probably won't work exactly for you. Each of us has a different way of doing things and different needs, depending on the type of photography we do and how we plan on using the images. Still, there will be elements that you will find useful and certainly you should feel free to use them. Also, read how others do their workflow. Over time you will develop a workflow that meets your needs.

So, for what it is worth, a workflow opus in three movements. Enjoy.

CAPTURE WORKFLOW - In the Office

This workflow begins with downloading images from the memory cards. I use Breeze System's Downloader Pro as it saves me some steps by allowing me to configure the download to bring the pictures directly into my folder structure. My folders are arrange as YYYY->month->YYYYMMDD. So, for example a picture taken on January 3, 2006 would be found on my image drive in 2006\January\20060103. I have configured Downloader Pro to both rename my images into my naming conventions and to convert each raw image into a DNG file. The name is an extension of the folder structure, so in the above expample, the first image would be named 200601030001. Using a four digit sequential number allows me to shoot 9,999 images in a single day. I have yet to run up against that barrier. I convert to DNG, as it is a bit smaller in size and I have yet to find any useful reason to maintain the camera RAW file.

One problem that many people have in setting up folders and naming conventions is that they try to cram too much information into the name. Folks, it just ain't possible. There will always be some info that you need that you either forgot about, or doesn't lend itself to a convention. The solution to this is don't try. Keep it simple. My folder structure and naming conventions allow me to find a photograph across a time span, but nothing else. That is what databases are for.

At this point, the images need to get into a database. Adobe's release of Lightroom has made this an easier and far more efficient process. Once the files are downloaded, I import all of the images into Lightroom's databasse, leaving the images in place within my folder structure. An important step here, when using Lightroom, is to add my copyright information to the image. LR's import function allows for this.

Once the images are imported, I do a multi-pass run through all of them. I look at one image at a time. The first pass is to delete any obviously poor images. If they are out of focus, badly composed, poorly exposed, whatever, they are immediately deleted from both the database and hard drive. Once this is done, I do a couple of more passes through the images with a more critical eye. If the picture doesn't work for me, it is deleted.

After I have the images down to the ones I want to keep, I now assign keywords and categories to all of the images. I don't add in captioning information at this point, as I only do that when I actually work on an image, either for display, sale, or for a client.

The final two steps are designed to ensure redundancy such that I don't lose any images to a crashed disk, fire, etc. I back the images up to an external Maxtor OneTouch drive. This happens automatically once a week, handled by my backup software, EMC Retrospect Pro, but I run the job manually after working on new images. The external drive exists on a separate computer, so the total failure of my imaging computer won't affect it. Once I have confirmed a good backup, I then reformat my media cards in the camera and I am ready to go again.

And at last, it is time for a beer.

CAPTURE WORKFLOW - On the Road

When I am traveling, my concern is not with databases and such. It is purely with protecting the images so that they don't get lost due to some hardware/software failure. I always travel with both a laptop and two external hard drives. I use Western Digital Passport drives with a capcity of 160 GB. I again use Downloader Pro and download into the same folder structure that I use on my computers in the office on one of the external drives. I also go through the same editing and renaming process.

Once all that is done, I then copy the new folders over to the second external drive for safekeeping. I now have two copies of the images. Both the laptop and the external drive stay with me as carry-on when I fly. Once I get home, I do an export of the Lightroom catalog on my laptop and then import it into my Lightroom installation on my main imaging computer. I then go through my backup procedures and verify before wiping the external drives and cleaning out the laptop installation of Lightroom.

Oh yeah, and don't forget the beer at the end.

PROCESS WORKFLOW

This used to be a rather involved process built around Photoshop. I used a bunch of adjustment layers to control white and black points, contrast and saturation. I also did capture and creative sharpening using Photokit Sharpener. However, with the advent of Lightroom, that all changed.

Unless I really need to do some heavy image manipulation, something I don't like to do as a general rule, I now do all of my processing in Lightroom. The only other exception to this is when I have multiple images for High Dynamic Range, in which case I process the images through Photomatix, from HDR Soft. For sharpening, I make good use of the clarity slider and do not find the need to run other sharpening most of the time. I still make many of the same adjustments that I did in Photoshop, but it is easier and faster in Lightroom.

Given that Lightroom does non-destructive manipulation of the image, but rather stores what you do as a sequence of instructions that it applies to the visual it puts on the screen, I have no need to save off large PSD files. Much easier on the disk space issue.

OUTPUT WORKFLOW

What happens here, depends on what I plan to do with the image. However, again Lightroom is the main software component in this workflow.

For web picture sets, such as what I do for travel pictures, I use the web gallery capabilities of Lightroom. This allows me to build a complete web gallery very quickly and efficiently.

When I want to have print output, then the print function in Lightroom works just fine. I print with an Epson Stylus Pro 4000, using Moab's Entrada Bright.

For email output, I simply export as a JPEG using either 60% quality for web/email disply, or 100% for something that I know is going to be printed.