Your Photography workflow?

[blinking81]

Hey,

What is your digital photography workflow?

So far, mine seems to be take the photos, deleting the truly awful photos as i go, but otherwise keeping the majority of shots.

Load them up into my Macbook running Aperture. Import all the photos adding metadata such as credit and amending all file names to reflext the shots via batch updating. Add tags and other relevant information.

Then work through them, stacking the similar shots, deleting and rating the photos. I then pick the best few shots from that day or shoot and edit them using apertures editing. Any i think need photoshopping, i edit in photoshop and a duplicate is automatically created reflecting the new changes.

Any i want uploaded to flickr, i send up via flickr upload.

So like i said, whats your process?

Eric

[RainPacket]

Shotting RAW, import into Aperture. Stack, tag, sort, discard, delete, upload any I like to Flickr. Anything I feel needs serious noise reduction, I export as a 16-bit full-size TIFF, load into NoiseNinja, de-noise, then import back in as a new master version.

For printing, I have ICS/ICC profiles for any print service I use, generally either the Costco one-hour printing (if I'm in a rush) or Mpix (if I'm willing to wait). So I'll create additional versions if I'm getting prints, and make sure the color's right for the service using on-screen proofing (and crop down to a different ratio if I have to).

I also have a smart album in Aperture automatically created from anything I've uploaded to Flickr (it's easy, since the FlickrExport plugin Fraser wrote stamps a 'Flickr ID' metadata value into any uploaded image, so I just made a smart album called "Flickr'd" which is any image with a 'Flickr ID' metadata value), which makes it reasonably easy to manage my Flickr photos from in Aperture.

For whatever it's worth, I'm running Aperture on a MacBook Pro with max'd out RAM, and an external 160GB Firewire drive for my Aperture library.

[Luftschiff]

I import them directly from the camera with the eos utility which also puts them in seperate folders sorted by date.

Then I open them in Lightroom and do almost all the work there..The finished shots are then either converted into jpeg (if they are finished) or Tiff (if i still want to work on them in photoshop) and organized into looots of different folders :P

The raws are then all transfered to my external hard drive ( i just cant get myself to delete them^^) and I start to choose the ones I want on Flickr which I then upload with the Flickr Uploader

[laepelba]

I shoot in RAW (this is a recent thing for me ... before December I was merely shooting in the largest jpg setting). I never delete while in the camera because my computer screen ALWAYS shows the image better than my camera screen, so I have more criteria from which to judge an image. I use 4GB cards, and I have three of those, so storage space is never an issue. (I'm not rich ... but see the 12GB worth of cards as an investment, saving images that I can analyze later when I have time.)

Now that I'm shooting in RAW, I go through them in Adobe Bridge, just to see what I like or don't like. I delete the ones that are hideous (something or someone moved into the path of the camera, or I forgot to set something like ISO or aperture, or in a shallow DOF shot I focused on the wrong thing...), but I tend to keep many of them. I process the ones that I like from Bridge to Camera RAW to Photoshop cs3. Then I upload to my photo critique website (www.photo.net) and sometimes to my flickr account.

Finally, I make a CD (or DVD if there are a lot) for backup. Every couple of months I also back up all of my photos to a large external drive. So I have two backup copies of every image ... on CD and on the external drive.

[Major_Small]

I would actually suggest you not delete images in-camera. First, it's less wear and tear on your memory cards to have one write cycle for each image you take, and one big delete cycle for all the images after you get them off the card. Also, sometimes an image isn't as bad as you think it is - something you can't always tell before you see it full-sized (or at least bigger than a camera's LCD)

Anyway, back on topic... Right now, I use most of my images for microstock purposes: take the pictures (in RAW), use gphoto2 to get them onto my HD, use GIMP to pick out (from thumbnails) the potential keepers to view full-size, pick the best one and edit accordingly, save as jpeg, upload medium size to flickr, tag with itpc data in picasa, upload to microstock agency, wait and hope for it to be accepted.

[PHugger]

I browse, rate, tag and sort my unworthy RAW images with Breeze Browse. I make all basic adjustments in Capture One. I rename and save in various as TIFF and do any retouching in PSP or PS. I usually batch convert them to JPEGs with Irfanview. Somewhere in there I move them to appropriate folders.



PCH

[katescasa]

I see that most of you shoot in RAW and then convert to Jpeg after editing? Is this to save room? Do any of you print? If so, do you send your RAW images to be printed or your Jpeg?

[laepelba]

Back to the idea of not deleting images in camera ... I also want to mention that it is a draw on your batter to constantly be reviewing and deleting images. I even know a few photographers (not me) who don't even set their cameras to give them a preview image after taking a shot. I like to get a few seconds to look at the shot ... but only to decide if I want to try some other angles, zooms, lenses, exposures, etc. And when I am tempted to sit down and review all of my images in my camera, I resist ... again, more battery waste.

[Nicole]

Originally Posted by katescasa

I see that most of you shoot in RAW and then convert to Jpeg after editing? Is this to save room? Do any of you print? If so, do you send your RAW images to be printed or your Jpeg?

I'm not sure if many places will print the RAW files . Adoramapix (who I recently had a stack of 11x14s printed from) only accept JPG and TIFF files. And mpix, I'm not sure, but from what I was just looking at they don't appear to accept RAW files either. I'm sure this is because those RAW files really aren't in print quality shape and depending on what RAW converter you open it in, it can have different results. So yes, I print, and yes I save to jpg so that I can upload them to the online printers. Aside from that, the reason I save as jpg isn't to save space (in fact, it doesn't save space for me at all since I keep my original RAW files as well as the jpgs). It's simply because that's a format that I can either put up online or send to a printer.

[Major_Small]

Here's the reason most places can't/won't print a RAW file from your camera:

Providing a detailed and concise description of the content of raw files is highly problematic. There is no single raw format; formats can be similar or radically different. Different manufacturers use their own proprietary and typically undocumented formats, which are collectively known as raw format. Often they also change the format from one camera model to the next. At least one manufacturer, Nikon, encrypts portions of the file in an attempt to prevent third-party tools from accessing them.

[Source]

Also, read the introduction on that article - it explains exactly what a raw file is

As for saving in RAW, it doesn't save space... actually, read the benefits/drawbacks sections of the above article... it briefly explains why you'd shoot in raw over going straight to JPEG. In general, if I'm planning on post-processing, I shoot RAW, but if I'm taking holiday snapshots of the family, I switch it over to JPEG.