Obivously there’s no point in wasting energy on images that definitely do not make the cut.

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The first and foremost step is to transfer the images from the removable media over to the editing workstation. There is a number of viable ways of transferring the images.

• Manually dragging over from the card to the hard drive
• Using the application’s built in method. (Most applications have this feature built in)
• Using a plugin to one of the applications.

My preferred method is to drag the images off the card onto my desktop and then use the Import from Camera Script to rename the images from the source folder and use the RAWxxxx target folder and attach my copyright & basic metafile template. This could be done in one step, by transferring and tagging at the same time from the card to the computer, however it’s possible that the transfer will fail or become corrupt. Although there’s an extra step involved I feel copying is safer.

Using an application’s built in tool may work for you but it should be able to preferrably attach the copyright/metadata while it’s transferring/renaming the images. This will eliminate an extra manual step later on.

As for the naming scheme, it should be easy to sort by and be relatively short since keywording is a much better way to organize the library. Right now, I’m sticking to this file format: NB_YYYYMMDD_UNIQUEID.ext but later on I will convert to NB_YYYYMMDD_UNIQUEID_CAMID.ext where NB are my initials, YYYYMMDD is the date format of the shoot , UNIQUEID is the unique ID of the image as shot by the camera (file number) and CAMID will be the camera identifier. It could be the name such as 10D or simply a camera identifier such as 01, 02..etc if there are several cameras of the same model, the ext bit is the RAW file extension.

Also, a bit of caution, I chose not to move my files into the RAWxxxx folder because if I add files a few days later and attempt to rename them to my standard format, the old files will be renamed once again, which I don’t want to happen.

After successfuly moving the files onto the desktop, I can format my card in the camera to be used for the next shoot. Now the real work begins…

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First, I sat down and decided what tasks I would be doing (in no particular order):

• Download the images to the hard drive
• Back up my originals
• Eliminate images of poor quality. (Don’t go overboard here, some images may gain value over time)
• Adjust White Balance
• Keyword
• Add copyright data/metadata/IPTC
• Label (Optional)
• Convert from RAW to TIFF or PSD (for editing master copies)
• Convert from RAW/TIFF/PSD to Large JPG
• Convert from RAW/TIFF/PSD to Small JPG (for websites/galleries/contest submissions)
• Convert RAW to DNG for forward compatibility. (DNG - Open RAW/Negative format developed by Adobe)
• Adjust Exposure
• Edit the image to maximize quality
• Catalog the Images

Now, that’s a whole lot of stuff to do, and it could take a while, unless you optimize your workflow process. By organizing the steps, a lot of unnecessary work can be eliminated.

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I’ve spent a bit figuring out my personal workflow and it wasn’t an easy or fun task especially because I did not know where to start and what to do…I’ve given some thought to creating a logical workflow and I’ve documented my progress up to date so others who are less familiar could make educated decisions when developing their own. Check it out, and feel free to contribute.

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My workflow begins when I take a photo with my camera. My camera’s color space is set for Adobe RGB (it offers a wider gamut than sRGB and loss of information should occur as close to the end of the workflow as possible). My camera is almost always set to RAW only mode. The only reason I would consider switching to JPG only is to shoot sports and that’s really no my thing although I will eventually try it out. I see no real purpose to shoot in RAW+JPG. It will create twice as many files; and with a good workflow you can generate JPGs very quickly anyway.

Once the images have been captured, they must be transferred from the capture card to the hard drive of my workstation. There are several ways of doing this effectively. However, before I jump into this, I sidetrack to explain why this step is not as easy as it sounds.
Initially, as many others, I tried to organize my images by theme on my hard drive. This may work initially but quickly falls apart in scenarios like this: I go on vacation with a friend to Alcatraz in San Francisco. Does the shot get filed under my friend’s name, Alcatraz, Vacation or San Francisco? The solution I came up with is to divide my workflow into two different “layers”

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Logical Layer - The logical layer is how I think about the photos.

To me, the logical layer is very important beause it offers a completely different way of organizing photos. By thinking logically and using well defined keywords from a controlled vocabulary scheme it becomes a lot easier to find all the photos with a specific keyword. For example, suppose I go to Australia every other year for vacation. I spend some time in Sydney and some time in Cairns. The photos I take in Australia are tagged like this: “Australia, Sydney, Vacation” and “Australia, Cairns, Vacation”. I also add other keywords that are more specific to each image. If the shot had a Kangaroo in it, it would be keyworded as such. Then, if I am looking for vacation photos, I can search by the “vacation” keyword. But if I’m looking for just Cairns vacation photos I could search for “Cairns, Vacation“. Even though the images are in separate folders they will still be found. Which is why having two separate layers makes sense to me.

Of course you probably don’t want to keyword and edit images you’re going to delete so my first step was to decide what order I am going to perform tasks in.

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Physical Layer - The reason I call it the physical layer is because that’s how I lay out things on my hard drive. Although I’m still dealing with 1’s and 0’s stored on my hard drive, it’s easier for me to think of these as physical objects.

The best analogy I can come up with is to think of your photos as books. A library does not buy 5 copies of a book to file under the author, subject, genre…etc. What they do is file the books in one way and you can look up books in several different ways using a catalog or in this wonderful day and age, a computer. This makes everyone’s life a lot easier. Applying the same concepts to photography will make digital asset management a lot easier as well.
The first bit I’ve adopted from the DAM book, is about physical file organization. I start out with an “ORIGINALS” folder as my main container with subfolders of approximately 4GB chunks. The 4GB chunks are split further by individual shoots. For example, if I was shooting at the Bronx Zoo and used up 6 x 1gb cards then I would have the following file structure:

[img place holder]

ORIGINALS

–NB_RAW0001_20060316

—–BronxZoo

——–imgx

——–imgy

–NB_RAW0002_20060316

—– BronxZoo

——–imgz

What this gives me is the ability to combine folders when optical storage sizes increase. It also keeps my archives in a chronological order. The subfolders will also be small enough that thumbnail viewing will not take a long time and software packages will not run into out of memory issues or other limitations. It keeps things a lot more manageable. After my image files are properly “filed” the hard part of creating an easily accessible logical catalog begins…

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So RAW is “in”. But what benefits does it provide? Well, for starters, a lot more control over the image. Two biggest benefits are: white balance adjustment & exposure compensation. But with RAW images, comes more work. It could be a very painful process, or a very easy and simple process. One of the easiest ways of making it a very painful process is to delay processing your RAW images as long as possible. I made the mistake of putting it off and now I have 8 DVDs worth of RAW images that need to be processed. And since I never truly sat down and analyzed my workflow I had not optimized my processes to be efficient and painless. As they say, hindsight is 20/20 but I’m glad I did what I did. When I first got my Canon camera, I shot both JPG+RAW because I knew how to work with JPG images but not RAW but I knew at some point RAW would be where I wanted to be. Now I have to go back in time and “catch up” to now. A reasonably time consuming task.

Another quick way to make it inefficient and slow is to repeat tasks several times. This can be accomplished by choosing the wrong software or by doing things out of order. For example, some programs are aware of Adobe’s XMP sidecar files while others are not. Trying to decide what software is right for you is a difficult process because you can either lock yourself into using a single software package or have to re-do some work at a later date to transition your image assets to a more standard format. Decisions!

Onto my workflow…

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This weekend was interesting. I’m pretty sure I have some form of an Attention Deficit Disorder because I have a 5 minute attention span and get bored extremely fast. Especially if I am doing a repetitive task that can’t be automated. I wound up going through all of my photos and removing the JPG images from the RAW+JPG combinations.
Then I was able to go through my most recent RAW folder and keyword, label and rate all the photos. I deleted what I rated as a “1 star image”. And convert that to the Adobe DNG format.
As it stands, 1 folder down, 7 more to go.

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Well, I finished the task of organizing everything on the physical layer and made a backup (Phase I), which already came in handy since I somehow nuked 3 images. I have a total of 8 DVDs worth of photos. Each ~4 gb chunk consists of subfolders containing the location & approximate date of the last shot. Now the logical sorting begins but I ran into a minor problem. Apparently Photoshop/Bridge do not come with a quick and easy way to analyze the technical qualities of the photo. Primarily the focus of the photo. There’s the slide show option but that does not have a nifty Magnifier tool like Raw Shooter Essentials/Professional has. As I was typing this, I searched for an XMP aware image viewer and came up with Photo Mechanic 4.4.2 which does exactly what I need to solve my problem. It lets me preview the images @ 100% and it’s quick.

On a side note, yesterday evening i had a brilliant idea that my computer needed more RAM (which it did, with only 640mb). As I pulled out some ram out of my other computers I got a little ambitious and figured since I’m already moving stuff around I might as well get my fastest computer and put the video card & ram in there and slowly move my stuff from this computer (second fastest) to the faster one. Well, I put the memory chips in and it kept giving me a continuous beep which was a memory problem. I fiddled with the memory some more and accidentally put in the stick of memory the wrong way. Well, once I powered up the PC I heard a crackling sound and a very distinct smell coming from within the PC. I quickly turned the PC off and analyzed the situation. Testing the memory in the other computer resulted in all 3 modules still working fine (I hope that’s the case). Everything showed up as 512 and worked. But the computer that it happened in did not POST or show anything on the monitor. Which probably means I fried the motherboard. After looking closely at it I did notice that one of the ICs was puffy and had a dark bubble on top of it.

Only means one thing. Time for an upgrade!

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