Ah Workflow...Part 1.
This entry was posted on 12/7/2006 4:07 PM and is filed under Techinicalities.
Corn seedlings in Hadley, Massachusetts. The Holyoke Range is in the distance.
Even before the age of digital photography, photographers struggled with the issue of workflow, but now that we are dealing in pixels rather than transparencies, the issue has been pushed to the forefront of photography for a lot of photographers. Marcy and I have a pretty good handle on our workflow (I'll give you the details below,) but it took a couple of years of trying and learning. We first grappled with the issue when we started converting transparencies to a digital archive in 2003. By the time we started shooting digitally in 2005, most of the pieces were already in place. We just had to add digital editing and RAW processing to the mix.
Sunrise over fog, Sugarloaf Mountain, Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Even with what I consider to be an efficient workflow, it can take some time for a particular image to make it from the camera to our on-line stock catalog. For example, the three images in this entry were shot in July, 2006, but I just completed the RAW processing today. The are a couple of reasons for this. First, is that I shoot thousands of images a year over the course of more than 100 days of shooting, most of which is away from home and the office. So there's just lots of stuff to do! Second, out of necessity I process assignment images first, so a shoot like my day in the Connecticut River Valley in July which was done for a project with a 2007 completion date gets pushed to the bottom of the pile. Thankfully, I'm starting to catch up on this year's backlog!
Big houses are cropping up next to (and in place of) farmland throughout the Connecticut River Valley.
O.K., so here's an attempt to briefly explain my workflow. Entire books have been written on this stuff, so don't expect a full treatise here.
1) New image creation is primarily done on a Canon 1DsMarkII with Sandisk 2GB compact flash cards.
2) Using a card reader, I download RAW files from my compact flash cards to the hard drive on my laptop. The files are also copied to a portable hard drive so that I have a back-up.
3) Using Adobe Bridge (which comes with Photoshop CS2,) I review the RAW file thumbnails, and use Bridge's labeling feature to mark the keepers and the files headed to the recycle bin. The "keepers" I open in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and magnify to 100%, confirming sharpness. The files can be opened in ACR directly from Bridge.
4) I then add copyright and caption info to the "keepers" using the metadata tab in Bridge. (I have set up metadata templates for my copyright info, so I can add this to all images with just one or two mouse clicks.)
5) Using the lightbox view in Bridge, I rearrange the thumbnails so that like images are together, and then I rename the files (using our image naming convention from the slide days). Bridge has a Batch Rename command that makes this easy. It's also preferable to renaming the RAW files manually in Windows explorer because Bridge will automatically rename any .xmp sidecar files associated with the RAW files (for an explanation of how this works, I can highly recommend Bruce Fraser's Book, Real World Camera RAW.)
6) Once the RAW files have been captioned and renamed, I'll open them in Adobe Camera RAW. I'll usually open several similar images at a time and work on them together. ACR lets you make RAW file adjustments to more than one image at a time or "synchronize" multiple images to use the settings of one previously adjusted image.
7) Once I have made the ACR settings for the entire batch, I open them all back up in ACR at one time and save them as 8-bit TIFF files. These Tiff files are then copied into a "production" folder on a hard drive on our main image processing PC in the office. The corresponding RAW files are also copied from my laptop to a hard drive in the office for archiving.
8) These office hard drives are then immediately backed-up onto portable drives that are stored off-site (our dining room.) Then the original files on my laptop are deleted to make room for the next shoot.
Only now, are the images ready to be put into our production pipeline, which gets them ready for clients, agents, and our website.
I'll discuss the details of this "pipeline" in part 2 early next week.
Until next time...
-Jerry
