photographic workflow

Using a digital camera is a lot like using a film camera.  Both take "film" in the form of either a strip of chemically impregnated plastic or a compact flash memory card.  When you take a photo, you set exposure, aperture and choose the relevant ISO level.  The major difference is that, with digital, you can change the ISO setting with every shot if you want to - with film you would have to change the film each time to do this.  This in essence gives you a 3rd parameter to control.

In a number of respects, the developing of digital photographs is also very similar to developing film. You take your basic negative (the RAW image file) adjust brightness, contrast, colour balance etc and then produce your print file (jpeg file).

The major difference is that with film, the look of the final print is largely down to how the developer in the shop (assuming you don't develop in your own dark room) adjusts the picture.  This is a completely objective choice, which may not be how you would like it to look.  For instance, when I used to get B&W film developed, they would quite often come back as 'grey & white' and had no contrast or punch.

With digital photography, the process in entirely under your control, you can make the photograph look exactly how you want it to and you can even make a colour photo into B&W which you can't really do effectively with film.  This does however mean that there is much more work for the digital photographer due to this extra 'digital darkroom' stage in his photographic process.

By reducing the number of steps you have to perform and organising yourself, you can dramatically speed up this process.  The process of getting the digital file from the camera to the final print is often referred to as the 'workflow' and below I describe mine.

1. Firstly, it's worth noting that I shoot all my photographs in RAW file format.  This is the rough data captured by the CCD/CMOS image sensor in the camera.  This way, I can adjust exposure, colour, contrast, white balance ect with much greater flexibility and accuracy than I could with a jpeg file.  For Nikon, these files have the suffix *.nef (Nikon Electronic File).

2. I download photographs from the card to PC using a Lexar USB2.0 card reader into a dated folder:
e.g. d:\photos\2009\2009-03-25 Norfolk Sunset\Originals\
I don't download them from the camera as its not usually as fast.

3. I use the Nikon Transfer utility (part of NikonView) to copy the images across and this allows me to add IPTC tags.  It also allows me to copy the exposure info into the ITPC comments field.

4. Once on the PC, I used Adobe Bridge (currently using CS2) to rename all the photos to give them a date (e.g. 09-04-25-dcs0234.nef).  This means they are easier to find in years to come when I have millions of photo's on my PC.

5. As this point I back the images up to a separate external hard drive so that if I accidentally delete an image during the sorting process, I can get it back (I keep the hard drive at work in case of fire and theft - my pictures are valuable to me!).  I also have two data hard drives in a RAID 1 array (parallel or mirror) so that if one fails, I have an exact copy as backup.

6. I have my camera and NikonView set to auto rotate the images when they are imported. When I used a D100, it was at this stage that I rotated the images manually.

7. Next I have a quick scan through all the thumbnail images, again using Nikon View, discarding the obvious duds.  Then I open them all full size in Nikon View and discard any further images that don't cut it.  This is one of the hardest parts of the process and you have to be incredibly ruthless and delete absolutely everything that is not quite right.  I tend to ask myself the following questions with images I'm not sure of:

  • Does it look good, fun, interesting etc?
  • Would I be happy to show this to people?
  • Is it sharp, well exposed etc?
  • Is it good enough to go on this web site or the wall at home?
  • Would I pay good money to get it printed?
  • Do I already have loads of shots like this?
  • Does it represent a good personal memory. Some shots may not be technically very good - however they may capture an important personal moment (first baby steps etc).

It's not always easy to delete some pictures, but if it's just not up to par it's not worth the time and effort.  With a DSLR you'll take loads more pictures than with a film camera, so you have to be sensible about what you keep.

8. Next is to carry out the RAW image adjustments.  For this I use Nikon Capture 4.4 (note, this software is no longer supported by Nikon and won't work with newer Nikon DSLR's - however the newer CaptureNX just doesn't have as good a user interface).  I open the image folder using the 'Multi-Image window', which brings up all the images as thumbnails.  I then work through the images one by one adjusting exposure, white balance, curves, horizon etc.  If I have a selection of similar images (not often) then I apply the same settings to a group, if not I have to make adjustments one by one.  This takes quite some time, and is not something I always look forward to! (Note: It's a good idea to save the images as you go as Capture does crash very occasionally - especially with iTunes running).

9. Once all the images are complete, I use Nikon Capture to 'batch save' all the RAW files to jpegs to a sub-folder of the dated folder the original raw files are stored.  Note: I never delete the original RAW files as I can go back to these and tinker etc if I ever need to.  Deleting these would be like throwing away your film negative strips!

10. Now I have a set of jpeg's that can be printed.  However, before they are ready to be printed, there are a number of final staged to complete.  Firstly I open each image in Photoshop and make any further adjustments.  These include

  • Ensure the image is converted to Adobe RGB 1998 colour space.
  • Further colour/saturation adjustments.
  • Image tweaks (make the sky more blue etc).
  • Convert to black and white/sepia/infrared etc if needed (I have some good actions for this).
  • Clone out imperfections (e.g. dust spots from the camera sensor, unwanted people in the background etc).
  • Cropping the image to improve the composition.
  • Etc.

11. To help me process the images quicker in Photoshop I use a script called Autoloader that allows me to open each of the images in a folder sequentially simply by pressing F3.  Each time F3 is pressed, the script saves and closes the current image and then opens the next image - magic!

12. I also use a number of actions (like a macro in Microsoft, an 'action' is a recorded set of commands) to save time. Most are image colour and tone correction actions and the rest are time saving ones (e.g. batch resize and save for the web).

13. Finally, once I have a set of images I like, I copy them to another subfolder to the main dated folder, resize them and convert the colour profile to suit the printing company I use.  I use ProAm Imaging who do nothing to the image I send them (on CD).  This means if it comes back crap, it's my fault - all they do is load the CD and print to the size I want.  They produce great prints and the prices are great too.

14. Finally I back them all up one last time and look forward to photos coming back in the post.

That's it, I hope you've found this article useful and interesting.
Jason
16th February 2006 (Updated March 2008)