Nigel Atkinson Photography
Equipment review: Photo Software/ Computing - 'Workflow'
Before reading this review please read my general introduction to reviews here
Its June 2008 and I've decided to rewrite everything on this page yet again!
Software and computers are central to any success in digital photography, and have as much impact on success as the camera. You'll find many discussions about 'workflow' which in my view is all about getting the finished image optimised as quickly as possible. Here is a rough outline of my methods:
I always use RAW format with my digital SLRs. I do shoot Jpegs with the IXUS and G9.
All my shots are collected on 2GB, 4GB or 8GBs cards so that I don't have to change them too often. (The 8GB card is a very recent experiment.)
I either keep images on the cards or download to a laptop. If I'm using the laptop I also back-up on a portable external hard drive before deleting images from the cards.
My main editing machine is a PC running Windows XP. I have two 500GB hard drives in RAID 1 so that I shouldn't lose any data if one drive fails. After any significant addition of images and manually run a back-up to another 500GB disk in the tower, and then copy this to an external 500GB hard drive that I keep in a different place.
I load images into folders named chronologically (ie 2007_11)
One on the PC I import all the images into Adobe Lightroom and rename the images starting with shooting date as YYYYMMDD.
I code all original Jpeg files as 'red' so that I recognise them as digital negatives and don't delete them thinking they are copies.
I go through the images quickly and give either 2, 3, or 4 stars plus delete for the obvious failures. I then select the shots with 4 stars and promote the best ones to 5 and reduce some to 3. When this is finished i look at everything with 3 stars and the those with 2. At the end of this review everything with 2 or 1 star is deleted and I often delete all the 3s too. I find this to be the only way to keep the number of files down. At present I have 13,600 images in Lightroom.
Within Lightroom I will adjust white balance, expose and apply a crop. I rarely make any other colour adjustments other than adding some saturation.
Normally anything with 5 stars will make it to a print and probably a web gallery. I use Lightroom to make web galleries but not for printing.
To print an image I convert the raw file within Lightroom and open it in Photoshop CS2. Here I can do any specific editing such as removal of dust spots or distortion. I then crop the image and size it to the print size I want. The last step is to sharpen the image, and I then add the date to the print as a text layer. Once I've done the print the file is deleted unless I know I'll want to make another print later.
I also spend some time most weeks maintaining the Lightroom database. I apply keywords and reassess image scores and crops. Some images do get higher star ratings as time progresses, but far fewer than those that I end up deleting!
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