Hot answers tagged workflow
40
The key is adding some specific tags every time you import.
I use Aperture (which is Mac-only,) but Lightroom has similar capabilities, as does iphoto.
What you need to tag depends on what you shoot, and what you think you might be looking for someday, but this works for me:
The people in the pictures. I use Apple's "Faces" feature to tag people in the ...
27
Photographic workflow applications such as Adobe Lightroom and Apple's Aperture provide this sort of history as a built in part of their functionality.
When you edit a RAW file in these, no changes are ever made to the original image. Instead, they are saved as 'instructions' separately. Thus, you can see a history of all changes made, and with a click ...
25
A photographer that claims an image is complete after taking the picture, is like a doctor saying you are healed after diagnosing your illness - it requires treatment.
Use the example of film. Back in the day you used to select your film stock, chemicals, chemical process, paper stock, cropping, and printing methods. These all had huge effects on the ...
23
Adobe Lightroom is one application which a lot of professional photographers would use both for reviewing large quantities of images, and also for doing some initial post-processing. A lot of photographers these days find they rarely use Photoshop anymore, finding Lightroom very powerful in it's organising and post-process abilities.
From it's conception, ...
22
Programs like Picasa, iPhoto, ACDSee, are pretty much all most people need. They let you sort/manage your photos in a way that lets you find them again, either by searching (e.g. for keywords you've added) or just sorting them in a way that makes sense to you. It's a big step up from having a bunch of folders of badly named photos on your hard drive.
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16
I'm not sure I ever have images I truly don't care about at all. I'm always for keeping them or against keeping them, at least.
My System
I use stars and flags in Lightroom:
Reject: Photos I will be deleting as soon as I complete the current pass, if I'm at home.
I defer deletion when I am working away from home on a laptop. I wait until I have merged ...
15
For a free option, have a look at Google's Picasa. It allows you to sort your images via folders and tags, and easily upload them for sharing.
It can be found here: http://picasa.google.com/
It also has rudimentary editing options, but I'd recommend Lightroom if you want a decent processing program. Conor's right, it's far from free at ~£250, but you can ...
14
I am an amateur photographer going semi-pro and even though I still only use RAW I have come across a few occasions where RAW+JPEG was needed (or at least would be a great convenience):
ready to email files (like @rowland-shaw wrote) - some times you need to get your photos out there as fast as possible
lite photo files to browse through - given that your ...
13
There are several features that I think are just awesome in one or the other. Depending on your needs, one of these features will make you (usually + some other things) go towards Picasa or Lightroom.
Lightroom:
Integration with other Adobe product (Photoshop, InDesign, etc)
More sophistication in editing (somewhere in between Picasa & Photoshop)
...
13
My solution for this was to purchase Lightroom.
My reasoning:
Lightroom's workflow is an awesome solution for this problem.
It's not too expensive (certainly not cheap either though).
It's a one time cost that saves be a lot of time.
Details...
Lightroom allows you to run through and flag your images (Yes/No/Unflagged) using keyboard shortcuts, so I ...
13
Personally I would say no , do not import back into Lightroom. As you say - you have the originals. And Lightroom does show you by default the 'latest version', so effectively, what you have exported. Just with the option to go back, edit, change, etc..
What I do is have a Lightroom Exports folder with my exported JPG files. I do not clear this out ...
13
One thing you might try is asking them to show you an example of a great photo that hasn't been "'shopped". If you define it as any photo that wasn't exactly as it appeared when the shutter was actuated, they probably can't. Just as the decisions made in the darkroom had a great effect upon the finished product in the film era, the decisions made at the ...
12
While Photoshop+Bridge generally offer the same capabilities, Lightroom is packaged and designed in such a way that all those capabilities are far more accessible. In Photoshop, you don't have at-hand access to the histogram, tone curve, white-balance (color balance), and exposure tools all at once. There are a wide variety of other photography-related tools ...
12
It sounds like you're fighting Lightroom's natural workflow a bit. Here's my suggestion, which is pretty close to a "standard" workflow for Lightroom:
Import your RAW files. As part of the import, you've got the option to move the files to another location -- that would be your external drive. Following the import, then, Lightroom knows about your ...
12
Not at all. Lightroom is a great tool with many well-integrated features. Version 4 which is roughly half the price of previous one adds maps, book publishing, soft-proofing to the already useful organization and processing tool.
The organization tools are probably worth the price alone and the export feature is the best one I've seen. So what if I don't ...
11
Adobe's XMP metadata standard supports information defined by the Metadata Working Group (MWG), which includes a definition of how to store face tagged data. See:
Adobe XMP: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/standards.html
MWG: http://www.metadataworkinggroup.com/
where you can click on the specifications, download the PDF, and then look at page 51 ...
11
There is not. IPTC, another image metadata standard, also does not contain a "People" field. There's a Contact field, but that is used for contact information for the photographer.
Most people I know will store people as keywords. The main debate is whether or not to include spaces (would a photo of me be tagged as aaronhockley or as "aaron hockley"?). ...
11
It doesn't make a lot of sense to organize photos by something that is already in the EXIF data, like the date the photos were taken. I organize my photos in folders by event/location. The most important thing is to make sure you tag as much as possible when you import. The chances of going back later to tag are basically nil, so you need to make sure to do ...
10
Recently, I've been exploring Exposure Fusion as an alternative to HDR. I've lost a lot of interest in HDR processing to improve photographs that can't be captured in a single photograph due to the amount of meticulous and very careful effort required to properly tone-map the extensive dynamic range of an HDR image into the far smaller dynamic range of a ...
10
If you don't want to pay for Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture, you could go with Apple's iPhoto or Google's Picasa.
I'm most familiar with iPhoto; it does a fair amount of hand-holding when it comes to organizing photos. Smart Albums are really nice; you write the filter logic, and iPhoto shows you the matching photos on an ongoing basis. Works wonders for ...
10
Are there any hidden advantages that I don't see in using DPP?
It depends on whether or not you believe the 'Canon marketing pitch.' :-) The pitch is essentially that because Canon makes the software and the hardware, their RAW processing is better than the competitors will be. Having done side-by-side comparisons I can say this... In straight ...
10
I use most of the Topaz Labs Photoshop Plug-in Bundle regularly, and consider it to be one of the greatest bargains available in the world of digital photography at the moment (when purchased as a bundle — and there's a fully-functioning 30-day trial so you can assess them yourself, as with most of the better plug-ins). But it is perhaps worth examining what ...
10
My general principles:
always work on a copy of your image
work on your best images - don't waste time editing all of them, just the ones you want to share/print/pulish
work non-destructively where possible (RAW editing, using layers, save intermediate steps if necessary)
when you are done, you image shouldn't look "edited"
Back up your files
Before you ...
9
First off, while I'll try to offer some helpful advice, I think that each individual should develop a workflow that fits their own personality. There is no one "correct" photo management workflow. That said, here are a few tips:
Optimize for discoverability over structure
Manually storing photos in a folder structure is a lot of work, and only provides ...
9
Several of the operations you're describing manipulate the data in the image such that information is lost or transformed. For the most part, I don't think this matters with traditional photography (ie, prints and the like), but it definitely matters when each pixel is considered a measurement of the number of photons.
What I think about when I do ...
9
Lightroom or Aperture
I left Picasa for Lightroom a couple of years ago, and I haven't looked back.
If you're on windows then I can pretty much guarantee that you will love Lightroom. It just brings loads of possibilities beyond Picasa, and all the editing is non-destructive, so you can always undo edits all the way back to the original RAW file (or ...
9
As both a computer scientist and a photographer, I can tell you that the benefits of a program like Lightroom, to me, far outweigh the risks. I've been using Lightroom since the 1.0 days because photoshop/imagej/gimp/etc were just not cutting it for me when I had 500+ images to edit in two hours or so.
I should preface by saying that I don't fear ...
9
I never really thought about it, and I don't really think there's a right sequence, but I guess my typical sequence is:
White balance: I shoot raw, and almost always leave the camera in Auto White Balance, because it's usually an OK starting point, and precise adjustment will be done in raw development.
Shooting mode: Most often Aperture Priority (Av)
...
9
In general - switch to a one program solution like Lightroom.
It gives pretty good results (I don't know how it compares to DPP though, but it must be at least comparable given its popularity).
It will handle the import, tagging, sorting, labeling, and most of your basic edits to the photo all in one program without keeping multiple copies of the image ...
9
Additive vs Subtractive Color Space
One thing to think about is that an additive color space (RGB) is different from a subtractive color
space (CMYK or others). There are colors you can display that you cannot print, and there are colors that you can print that you cannot display.
Notice how some yellows will print, but are not displayable, yet some ...
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