Digital Workflow Tips and Tricks...

[Wrinkleboi]

Lately I've really working on some larger projects and workflow is essential to editing them in a reasonable amount of time. I just thought we could start a thread on what everyone does after they plug their memory card into their computer.

I put my memory card into my card reader and open up Photo Mechanic 4.2.1. I have used this program in the past and it is a very quick and easy way to select your best photos and forget about the rest. The newest version I have also works with RAW files which is essential for me.
Anyways, I select "file > ingest disks" and move all of the photos from the CF card into a folder on my computer with an appropriate title. It automatically opens up a contact sheet for me to browse through when its finished. I choose 'view > all' and then open the first image. I browse through each image using the arrow keys and flag the ones that I think are the best by checking the box in the bottom right corner. When I am done flagging images I choose 'view > tagged' and it will only display the tagged images. If there arent many I just right click and select 'edit photo' which opens it in photoshop one by one. If there are a lot of tagged images I choose 'edit > select all' which will select all of the thumbnails that are currently being displayed (which should just be the flagged ones). Then I choose 'file > copy photos...'. I dont rename them but I do make sure to put them into a new folder, which is normally a subfolder inside the original which I name 'picks'.

[ok this is becoming much longer than I had intended, but I'm sure it will help others greatly who dont know about this. taking a breath... ok and lets move on.]

Next I move into Photoshop CS and open up the file browser. If I have a group of photos with similar lighting and exposure characteristics, then there is a great trick I learned recently for editing a group of photos at a time. This shortcut only applies to situations where your lighting and exposure are the same. Even if its a group of 8 here and a group of 6 there, etc etc within the same folder, this will still save a lot of time. Anyways, I double click on the first photo of the group and make any adjustments to color, exposure, etc. When I am happy with how the photos looks I hold down the 'Alt' key and click the button in the top right that now says 'Update'. This will take me back to the image browser and keep the changes I just made to the photo, but not open it. Then I highlight all of the photos that I want to have the same changes applied to. I right click on any of the selected images and choose "apply camera raw settings" and then choose "previous conversion" and click "update". This will apply the same settings from your previous conversion to all the photos you have highlighted. If all of your photos were shot exactly the same and with the same light you need only do this once, if you have various groups of photos then do it however many times you need. When you are finished your photos should all be pretty well adjusted and only need cropping and then move on to the next paragraph for converting to different file formats and resizing.

Another thing I recently found out about which is incredibly helpful with RAW files and jpegs alike is Dr. Brown's Image Processor (www.russellbrown.com). It is a free script that you install into Photoshop CS which will convert one file type to another, and will also resize them to whatever you want. This has been incredibly helpful to me for converting NEF files to resized JPEGS without having to sit at my computer all day long. I have also used it to resize a group of large jpegs into smaller jpegs for the web... that works too. It will also handle TIF files.

That is as far as I have gotten with all of this. I usually crop the photos by hand and just keep the normal serialized file names. As far as storage, I havent really found out anything great. I need a better way to archive my images but I'm not sure how to at this point.

If anyone has any other tips and tricks this is the place to post them. If you got this far, congrats. I just know that this info will definitely help some people out there so I wanted to make sure I typed it all out.

Bryan

[TurbeauxREX]

Bryan,

Thanks for the excellent post! I was hoping there might be some interest in the technical aspects of digtal photography. As soon as I have time, I'll contribute, as well. I believe I have something on this site regarding digital SLR sensor cleaning. I'll see if I can find it.

Peace,

Curtis