On Organization

On Organization

”Workflow” is one of those terms of art which infect photography (some of which, like dLog are fading as the number of photographers who’ve never heard of a densitometer rises). It happens the basic idea is probably not much newer than reproducible images. At its root workflow is how one moves from latent image (in the form of a negative, or an image capture, to a finished product.

There are a couple of sorts of workflow, which basically depend on what one is doing with the photos. For the casual photographer it’s pretty straightforward. When one moves to the serious amateur, or professional, it becomes more pressing.

The first question is file format in the camera. I personally recommend shooting .RAW, if possible. If your camera won’t do that, buy a larger piece of memory, and shoot .tif. This has the downside of requiring more storage space, because the files are larger, on the other hand, .jpgs are data poor. They have uses, but primary files are not one of them.

First, download the camera. When you do this you want to store them so you can find them two years from now when you don’t really recall what they are. Me, I have the date of download as the folder name, and each download, be it five frames, or a full disk (about 300 frames, from a 2 gig disk) is it's own folder. I find, by and large, a single batch of images is, generally, coherent; unto itself. Happily I can pretty much recall when I shot something. This system works because my editing is done with application I can use to look in the folders and see thumbnails. I commend this as well

Having come up with a system for keeping track of the files, I also think you want to keep them all together. A freestanding hard drive is cheap (a terabyte isn’t more than a few hundred dollars. 300 gigs can be had for a bit more than 100). Keeping one’s files is worth the money needed to store them. I’d also recommend a second hard drive, so you can back them up. Again, not losing the images, memories and suchlike is worth a little bit of money and time (because loading gigs of photos from one drive to another isn’t instantaneous). If you like you can arrange to have the freestanding drive as the primary download point, or you can start them in a folder on your computer and move them later. Don’t forget to regularly dupe them to the backup drive(s).

Open the folder, find the photos you want to work on, and open them in the application of choice. What you do when you save them is dependant on your end result. For printing, .tifs, at 300 dpi are what I use. If you want to email them to people, .jpg is the way to go. Mostly this is because .tifs are huge files. The 300 dpi. print files I make are in the 20-30 megabyte range; that’s coming from 4meg .RAW files. In practical terms, a resolution of 180 dpi is fine. It’s a decent compromise for onscreen viewing, and printing. Make sure, if you’ve made changes, to “save as” so the original image isn’t overwritten. That file is your negative. If you overwrite it all the potential in the original file is lost.

If uploading to a website (Flickr, Photobucket, ImageHack, etc.) resolution will change how it looks. The web has a limit of 72 dpi. Go to a greater resolution and the default is t make the image larger. This is fine, if the idea is for people to be able to print it, but if viewing online is the idea it can degrade the image. Play with it and see how things look. Then decide what you want to do. What I decided was to aim for a largest side of 800 pixels, and a resolution of not more than 125 dpi; for online images.

That covers a lot of the basics, relating to size. In most ways it also covers how to deal with single images. When one moves up to playing with a lot of images things get a little more complicated. Again, establishing a system helps a lot. Being able to look at all the images you want to play with at once is handy, because it lets you see if images in need of correction have the same sorts of problem.

This is where one’s choice of editing program starts to matter. Most of them allow for batch functions. The easier such functions are the better for workflow. Photoshop has “actions”, LightZone has, “styles”. I never bothered to learn how to do actions in Photoshop. Styles in LightZone are easy.

Take a representative photo. Make the corrections which give the general look you want. Save them. Open one more image. Apply the style. If that works, then select all the images you want to apply the style to, and click the button. It will apply the style, and then save the images as you wanted (format, resolution, batch name and final location). Open them with a picture viewing app and see if that did the job.

If you’re shooting weddings, or senior portraits, etc., this is really nice; because a problem which was missed at the shoot (a piece of mixed light, or a trifle overexposed, etc.) can be fixed on all the images, in a fraction of the time required to fix each one by hand.

This is where the professional (or serious amateur) encounters the problem of dichotomy. Unless you can make the time for the customer to come in and look at things. In the old days that was the way things went. No longer. A website, et voila at their leisure the images can be looked at. (I have a bride, who is looking at her fourth anniversary. She has prints, but the enlargements still haven’t been ordered. She’s just too busy to come in and go over them with me; had she gotten married a year later, this wouldn’t be the case. Right now it’s not a big deal. She’s not unhappy; I got prints to her in a couple of weeks, even with some problems at the printer [some hair got onto a couple of negatives; unacceptable], but she doesn’t have the album friends and family want to look at. When she decides she really wants those larger prints, she’ll make the time, and I’ll make the money).

Now you have a problem. How to present the images. Wedding photographers’ workflow issues are worse, because a lot of them insist on making promotional packages; in the hope this will inspire the couple to plump for more expensive things, which often means making slideshows, and the like. It’s a mixed blessing. The extra work required delays getting the pictures where the client can see them, which takes the bloom of the rose a bit. I know couples who are still waiting, more than a year after the wedding to see all the pictures taken by the photographer they paid good money to do the job. Uncle Joe and Aunt Millie have become, de facto the families provider of memories.

Which is why I favor a quick pass in the editor. Takes a couple of hours. The garbage gets tossed, the marginal gets set aside and the good images get a quick massage. Then open the batch converter, select all the preliminary images and turn them into .jpgs. If your preferred app doesn’t have a batch function... buy one that does. The hassle of learning how use one more program is more than balanced by not having to convert all the images to .jpg one, by one, by one.

The last step (in client work) is one of not putting things off. Right now, you probably have nothing pressing on the plate. Make the effort to spend the time going over all the photos with a fine-tooth comb. Sort them into groups; by needed correction. (you can play with them for editorial effect later). Where possible make batch corrections. Where needed open them up and make the individual ones. I like to open a word-processor and make notes about what mistakes I made. That way I will be less likely to make them the next time I encounter such problems). If you put it off, waiting until the client says, “I want this one, and this one and this one, and can I see the one’s you didn’t post to the website?” you will end up being the sort of photographer who pulls all-nighters; with the concomitant failure to do one’s best, or the sort who has clients waiting years for photos from the event. Neither of those is what you want.

For “art” photography things aren’t quite so pressured. I tend to work on things which relate to each other. This isn’t a batchwork deal. Even when doing lots of shots of the same basic thing, the problems aren’t the sort which lend to brute force. I might be able to apply an “action” or a “style” but I have to see the large image to make up my mind. After I edit them, I save as a 300 dpi .tif, and store it in a “pending’ folder.

When the folder has enough; which is a rule of thumb deal... it looks full and I start to work on it. I resize to web-resolution. One of the things which tends to be more common in my nature photography is cropping. “Art” shots are often very carefully composed in the viewfinder. The same for landscapes and portraits. Event shots are usually composed pretty much full frame.

In real terms, crop is immaterial. The crop is what I want to show the world, and the final print size is going to be pretty much paper dependant. If the ratio makes a lot of white space, top and bottom, that’s part of the image. But the screen is a fixed resolution. The way the web shows a thing at higher resolutions is to make it larger. For a couple of reasons I don’t want to do that. One, it’s easier for someone to decide to take a copy and print it out, large. Two, it’s harder to appreciate at that size on the screen. If it’s compressed there can be odd edge-effects. If it’s too large the screen can’t show all of it.

So I set an arbitrary number, one which is large enough to show the detail, but small enough to be seen on most people’s screen. 800 pixels across is the target. For my sensor that’s 97 dpi on a full frame image. If the crop is really strong (say for a 4x4 sq image) I’ll go up to 125, and settle for a smaller image (about 620 pixels) on the screen. I’ve done enough that I can get really close on the first try. When I save that (as a copy) it goes to a folder for uploading. When I’ve done with that it goes in a folder with every .jpg I’ve ever converted.

My personal opinion on workflow is get started as soon as a batch of images is pulled off the camera. Spend a two to three hours at a time. Set up the images so you can feel you’ve completed what you were working on in those hours. The most important part of it is to keep the entire process fun. Planning the photos and taking them is usually going to be fun (if it isn’t, you need to think about changing something, a new area, or a long vacation doing something else with the camera, etc.), but the back-side can be tedious. If that happens you start avoiding it. This is bad for the professional, it’s terrible for the amateur. As a professional you have to go to the editor; the client, or the landlord, mandate it.

As an amateur, no matter how much you love taking pictures, having thousands to go through can be daunting. Again, just set aside a couple of hours and play with them. You can come back later, and work on the rest.

Finally, a word on naming. No one likes to title a piece _AD45901_98, it’s ugly, it’s dull and it says nothing about the photo. It is, however, a useful thing, because it relates the photo to other photos taken at the same time. When I title an image, the file has the camera number included; after the title. When I publish it, I clip that off the name. When someone says they want to buy a copy of, “X”, they are referring to the .jpg they saw. I need to get to the .tif, which isn’t a big deal, if I’ve not misplaced it (it’s taken a few years, and a few mistakes to get the system I have now). If I’ve misplaced it, I go that .jpg folder, and find the image, by name. Then I go to one of the storage disks and search by file number. That will get me to the edit file, which is stored with the .RAW file. From there I can remake a .tif version.

I learned this the hard way. I started keeping the camera source name after I decided I wanted to print something, and couldn’t find it. It adds a small amount of work when uploading to the web, other than that it matters not. I also keep the .exif data, so I can check to see when a photo was taken; if I want to go back and look at other things from the same time frame.

So that’s my thoughts on workflow. In a nutshell it’s all about figuring out the easiest (not always the fastest) way to take the image from camera to final output. What works for you is what works for you. The rest is all nibbling at the edges