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The Digital Workflow - Part 1 Photo Management

Here's is a tutorial that I've done for the Earl Shilton Camera Club. It covers the basics for the Digital Workflow that is so important for digital photographers today.

Hello fellow Camera Club members here I am on my daily commute from Barwell to Coventry, 30-40 minutes of monotony that is the M69 and then the dirge of the A46 towards Toll Bar “suicide” Island. With the newsletter in my mind I’ve been trying to think of ideas encourage members to come up with new things and think differently. An important aspect of making sure that your photos are organised is part of a system something called the “digital workflow”. It has been written about in magazines many times. However I’m sure to many users who snap away taking many pictures filling up their SD and Compact Flash cards, and then watching the upload of said pictures to their PC wondering what to do next. “What shall I do with all these pictures I’ve taken with my digital camera?”

There are number of ways to deal with your snaps, but it is important you find a one method and stick with it. There is nothing worse than taking a picture from 2-3 years ago and you think to yourself, “yes it was a picture with a red boat in it, now what did I do with it?” “Did I view it, print it, send it, or delete it?” “Where did I file it?” Who knows!! If you haven’t given it a decent or memorable filename or if you haven’t given it something we call “tag” it, i.e. describes the file with things like “keywords” making it a searchable item, then it can be very difficult to track down that. You say to yourself, “It had a filename of 4386; I took it in, now was it 2005 or 2006, which camera was that....... you get the picture, ha ha picture, get it?? Basically it can almost be impossible to find that picture of the red boat.

There is a few points to consider as members some would have done this, some won’t but I think its important to find a method and stick to it. So the first thing what we need to do after taking all those lovely pictures is to download them all into a folder, these will be your negatives. What I’ve done is created a folder in Windows Explorer and give it a name that has longevity to it all so for example I’ve created a folder called negatives in there I’ve created sub folders relating to the year that I’ve taken the pictures. So, for example, this year it would be 2008 and then using the camera filenames, because hopefully you’ve all set your cameras so that it continuously remembers the number rather than starting from 1 each time it takes a picture, upload it into this folder in the format you’ve taken it. Now at some point we will to consider the merits of raw and jpeg images but for this exercise we’re not going to worry about that, we’re just going to upload the pictures using either a card reader or the camera (connected to your PC via a USB cable) to upload the picture. You can use Windows Explorer to copy and paste the picture or your favourite photo imaging uploader. I know Photoshop Elements has a very good photo uploader. So once you’ve done that, you’re not going to delete those pictures. They’re going to stay there forever. These are your negatives. What I tend to do is when I’ve taken my pictures I review them on the camera and delete any that are obviously dross, anything that’s out of focus, poor composition, bad alignment and all that type of stuff that makes the picture bad. I delete any dross before I start and then the pictures I’m happy with, that I’ve got them on my camera, I just literally upload them on to my PC.

It’s important before we move any further to keep these pictures backed up and again there are a couple of methods which you can back up these pictures. You can either back them up using CDRW or CDRs for those of you who are not that technically minded they are just basically writable CDs or rewritable CDs. For those who have more pictures, obviously you will use a DVD writer with writeable or rewriteable DVDs. If you have even more pictures you can use Dual Layer DVDs which can handle up to 8 or 9 GB of data. For those who just snap away every day of the week and have thousand of pictures then you will need an external hard drive. By that way you are taking the risk away from your laptop or PC and putting them on to an external drive. To even out way your risk even more you would then copy the files onto another drive and store it off site but more of that later.

Once you’ve stored your pictures as negatives what next. Well really what you need to do is find a method of how to file your images, search for them and remember where they are in a place where it’s going to make sense to you. For example, what I’ve done is I’ve taken each day that I’ve taken a picture and a location. In September I went to Cornwall, so on the Friday, which would have been the 26/09/08, we went to Boscastle. After taking a load of pictures in Boscastle, after uploading to the negatives folder, I would then create a folder with the date and the location. In this example it would be 08 for the year 09 for the month and 26 for the day followed by a space and then location – 080926 Boscastle. Then all the pictures that are relevant to that day and that location you would copy into that folder. Then you could either do one of two things. You could either start going through those pictures individually and then deleting the dross or you could say I’m happy with those I’m going to rename these files so rather than relying on the inbuilt camera file name like the Canon ones I know it’s IMG_ and then the sequential number of the picture. You can give it a filename again the date the location and I always think using the camera’s continuous number is always a good indexer so I would keep that in as well.

At this point you may want to convert the pictures if it’s RAW into JPEG or just leave it as it is for post processing later. So that’s part two finding a meaningful way of remembering where your pictures are and storing them in a method that you know where they are. You can then say to yourself, “I remember taking that picture nice red boat where was I? I was in Boscastle that day you can then search for pictures with the name Boscastle” You can then roughly remember what time of year, and again, you can search by month. Unless you’ve been to Boscastle thousands of times but because it’s so far away, Cornwall, blimey, it’s a long way down. It’s a good 5 to 7 hour journey from the Midlands, depending on traffic, so you’ve only been there once or twice so it makes it a lot easier to find that picture you’re looking for.

The next bit is the fun bit. A couple of things you can do afterwards, you can do your post processing in which you can tart it up adjust the levels, hang on am I being a bit ahead of myself here? Maybe some of you are not Photoshop users who don’t know what layers are so at this stage we won’t worry about that, basically adjustments to your picture to make it a little bit better.

Finally what do you do with it afterwards? You’ve taken the picture you’ve taken away the negatives, you’ve manipulated the picture and you’ve given it a decent file name. What next? Well most people leave it on the PC and it gets stored there for years and then all of a sudden it’s picked from obscurity and entered in to a competition. But there are many ways which we’ll cover in later episodes that you can create slide shows by putting them on DVDs. Create your own movie if you like or you can print them off and put them in photo albums. There’s lots of good ways to deal with pictures these days not only can you use your own printer, but the price of printing your own picture through web services is a lot cheaper than it used to be. Finally you can create your own website so that everybody who has access to the internet can see your effort. You don’t have to create your own, you can upload your pictures to websites like Flickr (www.flickr.com) and Ephotozine (www.ephotozine.com). We‘ll come back to that in later issues just to go through the options in how to show off your pictures, there’s nothing worse than taking all these great pictures (I’m as guilty as the next man) and only entering them into competitions and they may not be your best work and so who actually sees your good work, possibly nobody! We have to come up with ideas to ensure that all our good pictures can be seen by one and all just to prove how good we are at taking pictures.

If you have any questions regarding digital workflow in this particular section please let me know and I’ll make every attempt to answer your questions.

Next Time…. Part 2 – Photo Management – How to organise using Photoshop Elements.