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It’s Personal – What’s Your Digital Workflow?
By: Mike Fox
Since the acceptance of the digital format of photography, the volume of post-picture work has increasingly fallen on the photographer instead of a
dedicated darkroom technician. From a photojournalism perspective, this allows us to deliver images of time-sensitive events within moments of them
occurring. I have colleagues who shoot an event, and are uploading via cellphone (or wireless phone PC card) within minutes. For those less frantic
events, digital photographers develop a workflow that suits their particular needs and circumstances. What does this mean?
When a camera stores an image on a memory card, it needs to be transferred to a computer so that several things can happen to it before it is filed with a
photo agency or wire service. These include -
- Renaming
- Captioning
- Tweaking of light settings
- White balance adjustments
- Cropping (if necessary/appropriate)
- Editing
An image from a CF card will typically be given a generic name by the camera system which is pretty meaningless to the average human. The first thing I do
when I have downloaded images to my laptop is rename them in a way that I can recognize and which makes sense to the agency I am filing to. A shot of an
aid worker in the Sudan might change from DSC01196.jpg to OxfamSudan_010505_001.jpg. The file name breaks down to – name of aid agency, location, date
(mmddyy) and sequence number plus the file extension. Different agencies have different naming requirements but this is what I use to archive my own images
and it has been accepted by most of the companies I work with.
With this done, I make a copy of all files and store them in a working folder, saving the originals in a master folder. I then use Canon software to batch process
images as necessary, to convert from RAW to JPG (if I used RAW capture) or to adjust the image size to suit my client’s needs.
Next is editing and captioning in PhotoMechanic. There are programs similar to PhotoMechanic that can show you thumbnails of images and allow you to make some
basic changes, add captions etc. But PhotoMechanic is the preference of myself and many colleagues and once you have become very familiar with a product, it is
difficult to change. In PhotoMechanic, I first ensure that all vertical images are rotated to the right orientation, then I do a first pass edit. I keep in mind
that I may have taken in the region of 500 images of an event, and need to file 30. So the first edit is pretty hard on anything that is even remotely substandard.
This normally gets me down to 80 or so images which I will caption using PhotoMechanic’s batch captioning feature. I will then run through them again, piecing
together an end-to-end story and dispensing with images that do not fit in. This will bring me down to about 40 images.
The final step is Photoshop/Bridge where I will inspect each of these images in detail, make any modifications to white balance, light levels and cropping that may
be necessary, clear out the final 10 images, and then have a set that is good to go to the agency via FTP. I use Transmit for the Mac. Depending on the detail
required for captioning, the whole process can be completed in 20 minutes. Thankfully I have a number of actions setup in Photoshop, which take care of the most
typical white balance issues and light level changes.
Ask five photographers what their workflow looks like, and you will likely get five different answers. This is mine and it works for me. Yours may be different
because of what you photograph, or the software you use, or the clients you work for. Some photographers spend more time setting up a semi-automated workflow
system for themselves than others who simply rely on the fundamental features of a number of applications. Workflow – it’s personal.
Mike Fox's Bio
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