Digital Workflow, part 2

Yesterday, I started my series of blogs on digital workflow. If you missed it, it may be best to go back and read that first.

So, you have had a great time out shooting and are back home with a bag of memory cards full of... well, who knows what. Our hope is always that we have those killer shots that capture our subject to perfection and in our rush to see what we have we often just dive in to copying the images to the computer as quickly as possible.

However, it is better to be a bit more methodical and just do one or two things first to save loads of time later.

There are many bits of software out there that photographers download their images into. Some are plain rubbish, others are sophisticated enough to satisfy the National Archives. We pays our money and takes our choice.

My program of choice is Adobe Lightroom 2. Why do I use this and trust my images to it?

1. It is made by Adobe and integrates superbly with Adobe Photoshop.

2. It handles RAW files really well and saves me having to open the file in a RAW processor first and then import it into another program. I can do most of my image adjustments in Lightroom.

3. It is not just an image processing program. Lightroom is a massively powerful indexing system. If you get your workflow right you should never lose an image again. Lets face it, it is easy to find an image we want a few days or weeks after a shoot. But after several years of feverish shooting building up a library of many thousands of images and you suddenly need to find a shot of a particular person/bird/location or whatever, how do you do it in a couple of seconds without a program like Lightroom? It has saved my life on many occasions.

4. Lightroom also has wonderful export abilities - creating pdf slideshows, templates for fine printing and the ability to save just about any favorite settings as pre-sets to apply in an instant to future images.

5. It is brilliant at processing images in batches. If you do a shoot and have 100 images where the white balance needs correcting on them all, just correct one image and it will apply that change to the remaining 99 in a second or two. It takes much of the tedium out of image processing.

I could go on, I am a bit of a Lightroom evangelist!

So, back to workflow. You are back at your desk. Computer booted, coffee at the ready and a pile of memory cards to explore. Whats next?

When you insert the memory card in the reader, Lightroom opens and gives you a number of options. This is what I choose as part of my workflow (see the screenshot above);

In the 'File Handling' drop down box, I select 'copy as digital negative (DNG) and add to catalogue'. By selecting this the RAW format used by your camera is converted to Adobe's universal RAW format. Some photographers are concerned that RAW formats vary so much and are updated so often that the time may come when their older images may no longer be able to be opened (how many people have huge video tape collections that may soon be unusable due to the demise of the video recorder? And yet photographs are a bigger issue. Videos can usually be bought as DVD's, however our images are unique an irreplaceable).

To remedy this Adobe has created a universal RAW format that they have vowed to maintain forever. I have chosen to go with them. You can read more about it in this Adobe pdf - http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/pdfs/DNG_primer_manufacturers.pdf - you have to make your own choice.

The next option allows you to specify the folder you want the images to be put into on a hard drive. I select 'My Pictures'. Lightroom then creates a folder in 'My Pictures' named with the year. In that folder it creates a folder for the day the images were taken in such a way that the folders are in date order with January 1st at the top down to December 31st at the bottom. See below.

In the options box I also select the 'back up to' option and select a location on one of my external hard drives. This makes a copy of the images for you so if one hard drive fails, they are still on another. It is only after Lightroom has copied the images from my memory card to these two different hard drives that I will consider formatting the memory card.

The options box also allows you to use a filename template. There are several options in the drop down box. I use 'Filename-Date'. This uses the filename given to the image by the camera and adds the date in front, which I find useful. You can create custom names, names that give you 'image 1 of 45' type formats and so on. There will be one that suits you.

I also use the metadata template. Metadata is information embedded digitally in the file. You can't see it when you view the image but with a program like Lightroom you can read it. It holds information embedded by the camera at the time of the shot like the time, date, lens type, lens and exposure settings and so on. With Lightroom you can add more metadata that you find useful. I, for example, add my name and copyright information along with my web address so that buyers can have no excuse for not approaching me to use an image of mine.

The final option I use here and maybe the most important is the adding of keywords. This is the boring bit that many photographers skip. You need to type in all the words you may need to find these images in future years. Words about the location, names of people in the shots, the season, if it is dawn, dusk, or a macro shot and so on. It is better to add too many keywords than not enough.

Lightroom helps in this because it lets you create keyword templates which give you sets of keywords you can quickly apply to an image and then add any specific ones afterwards. You can also add keywords to specific images later if you need to. I am so pleased I have done this diligently for years as now when a customer approaches me to ask if I have a panorama of Durdule Door taken at dawn in the spring I can check in seconds. I have sold many images as a result of my careful keywording - even though I find it boring and it irritates the life out of me!

Now I click 'ok' and let Lightroom copy the images over to my hard drives.

In the next article I will outline how Lightroom then helps me to sort and categorise my images quickly and easily, helping me focus on the gems I want to spend time processing.