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This page describes some of the basic digital photo workflow procedures I have found useful. It is written for the benefit of someone just starting to do serious digital photography. My current skill level would probably be ranked as advanced amateur, certainly not even approaching that of photography professionals, so this is just a summary of a few lessons I have learned.
Here are three excellent books on digital photography that have been very helpful to me. I suggest reading through at least one of these before buying any more digital photography gear or software, as the authors give plenty of practical tips that can save you money.
- Complete Guide to Digital Photography (with tutorial CD), Rick Sammon,W. H. Norton & Company Inc., New York, 2004, ISBN 0-393-05729-1, ISBN 0-393-32551-2, $US 45. This is an excellent book with chapters on digital cameras, the digital darkroom, how to use Photoshop, special digital effects and techniques, and lots of photography tips.
- Complete Digital Photography (with CD), 2nd ed., Ben Long, Charles River Media Inc., Hingham, Massachusetts, 2003, ISBN 1-58450-231-2. Helpful chapters on basic photography, choosing a digital camera, building a workstation, basic principles of shooting, manual exposure, special shooting, using image processing software (e.g. Photoshop) for editing images, correcting for tone and color, etc. It's an excellent book, and covers some areas that are not in the Sammon book.
- Digital Photographers Handbook, 2nd ed., Tom Ang, Dorling Kindersley Ltd., New York, 2004, ISBN 0-7566-0346-3, $US 40. An outstanding book that covers some topics not included in the first two books, including quick fix techniques for digital images that need it, many ideas for photography (e.g. photographing clouds, close-up photography, festivals, abstract imagery), practical ideas for image manipulation, the output adventure (to paper, web, portfolio, etc.).
There are dozens more books available, more appearing by the day as digital photography takes the world's shutterbugs by storm. The choices can overwhelm you as you visit your neighborhood bookstore (Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.) or go on-line to such giants as Amazon (http://www.amazon.com) or Barnes & Noble (http://www.bn.com). Choose a book that fits your photography goals, the skill level you hope to attain, and the time and money you wish to invest.
PROS AND CONS OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY
One advantage of digital photography is that you can take lots of shots, throw away the bad ones, archive some of the so-so ones, and select a few best shots for image processing (cropping, tonal corrections, etc.) and either printing or sharing on the web. No wasted expenditures on film or film processing, no dusty boxes of boring photos or negatives you'll never look at again. You're in control, you keep only the good ones and maybe a few so-so ones, and you decide how the final image should look. Sound great? Well, it almost is, so long as you realize that you're going to be spending some serious time in your "digital darkroom" (e.g. your computer and Photoshop) to get those outstanding images. Of course you could just have Walmart or Rite-Aid process all those digital images you shot, or go on-line and let Shutterfly do the work for you. But you'll get much better results if you do it yourself.
Here's a list of what you'll need to produce really great images:
- a reasonably good digital camera with optical zoom that allows you to control the focus and exposure, and a CF card (or equivalent) with at least 250 MB capacity, and 1 GB if you intend to shoot RAW-format images.
- a computer (Mac or Windows) with as much RAM as you can afford and a hard drive with at least 80 GB capacity. (Mine is a Mac G4 with 120 GB hard drive.)
- image processing software such as Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, etc. (I use Photoshop CS.)
- image cataloging software such as iPhoto (Mac) or iView (Mac or Windows)
- if you shoot RAW-format images, you'll need a good RAW image processor and converter. (I use C1 Pro from Phase One.)
- a good quality inkjet printer such as the Epson C64 or Epson 2200
- a high-speed internet connection (DSL or cable modem) if you want to upload to or download from the web; dial-up connections are inexpensive but maddeningly slow
- some blocks of time for processing your images
- basic knowledge of how to compose a good shot before you press the button on your camera; read a good book on basic photography skills.
- someone (a kindly relative or friend) who tells you from time to time what beautiful pictures you're taking. Encouragement helps.
I routinely use both Mac G4 and Dell Win-XP machines and they're both great. I use the Dell computer to handle much of my professional computing in antennas and microwave engineering, where the specialized CAD software I need is simply not available for the Mac.
But when it comes to digital photo image processing work the Mac is my machine, and OS 10.3 is my operating system. It's much easier to use, stimulates my creative juices, and comes with a seamlessly integrated iLife software package that includes iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes. The stunning image quality I get on the Apple 20" flat panel LCD display is another reason I like the Mac. I have hundreds of other reasons including the outstanding software choices for the Mac operating under OS 10. Of course you can also do outstanding work with a good Windows machine with a high-quality display, ample RAM, and a large-capacity hard drive. There is even more software available for Windows, so the choice is whatever platform and operating system and price that makes you most comfortable.
If you're buying a computer or upgrading your old one for digital image processing and storage, there are three important things you'll need: fast clock speed (2 to 3 GHz preferably), lots of RAM (minimum of 512KB), and a large-capacity hard drive, at least 80 GB. You'll spend anywhere from $1500 to $3000 to get this in a desktop model, somewhat more if it's a high-performance portable powerbook/laptop. Personally I don't lug along my powerbook for two reasons: I shoot close to home and am never more than a few days away from my Mac G4, and the camera gear with tripod is already heavy enough, so the powerbook (a Ti-book) is just too much baggage. But if you're going on an extended vacation and plan to do some serious shooting and if you can figure out the transport logistics for the camera plus computer baggage (plus your clothes and everything else), the laptop/powerbook does have one big plus. At the end of a day's shooting you can download your images onto the hard drive of your laptop and free up your CF card for the next day's images. An alternative is to dump your images directly from your CF card is to purchase a specialized compact hard drive known as a "stand-alone data storage unit". One example is the 40 GB FlashTrax from SmartDisk (model FTX40) which allows you to view your images in storage. Cost is about $500, so it isn't cheap. When you get home to your desktop, you can transfer your images to your computer's hard drive.
Workflow is the process of transforming images that you've captured and stored on your computer to final finished prints or displays on a website. This process takes advantage of powerful image cataloguing, processing and conversion software.
The workflow process steps depend partly on whether you're shooting compressed JPEG or uncompressed RAW images. It also depends on the final image quality you want. If you're capturing the family picture, you'll probably shoot JPEGs, and do a minimum of image processing (maybe cropping, removing red-eye and a little tonal balancing), and distribute the final result via email, your website, or 4x6 color prints. But if you're seeking high-quality images of birds, wildflowers, landscapes, etc., you'll want to invest more time to get the very best output possible.
Details of the workflow process can be found in the digital photography books listed at the top, and in numerous websites prepared by professional photographers. Here are a few highlights that I have learned are important.
1. Save, backup and organize original images. I begin by quickly winnowing out the images I want to keep and those to be trashed. I scan through preview images (Photoshop CS) of the captured digital "roll" and sort into the keepers (including both the very best and also the so-so photos), and the blah pictures. I then look once again at the blah category to make sure there isn't some piece of the photo that might later be useful. If not, I send it to the trash. I usually keep about 30% of my images for further processing.
Next I backup my original image keepers to a separate hard drive and an external Maxtor hard drive. An even better strategy, which I haven't used yet, is to backup these images onto an off-site server or to CDs or DVDs that can be transported off-site. This is valuable in case of fire, theft of your computer and hard drives, etc. But it also takes a considerable amount of time, so it's a tradeoff to be considered.
It's a good idea to make a working copy of your images then lock your original photos before storage and backup, especially for JPEG images.
Next I use an image cataloguing program (iPhoto or iView Media Pro) to organize the original files. This allows you to rename files, add keywords, names, locations, etc. The iPhoto program is easy to use but has limited capabilities for adding keywords, locations, etc. so I use the iView program as my primary cataloger. The time spent in catalog entries makes it MUCH easier to find just the image needed out of thousands.
2. Pre-editing: image conversion and preparation. The next step is to prepare your images for editing, and do format conversion. I use Photoshop to create three categories of images: (1) print images, usually 240 ppi at 8"x10" in TIFF format, (2) medium-size JPEG images for the web, 72 ppi, 640 x 480 pixels, and (3) small-size thumbnail JPEG images for the web, 72 ppi, 60 x 45 pixels. These can be put into separate folders within a subject area, e.g. bald_eagle_print, bald-eagle_web_medium, bald_eagle_web_thumb. For web uploads, use Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature to create 72 ppi images with medium JPEG compression, giving reasonable image quality and smaller file sizes. For the best prints, convert your original images from JPEG or RAW to TIFF (no compression) format, and do all subsequent image processing in TIFF. Each time you save to TIFF after changing tone or color, you do not suffer image compression as you would using JPEG. The only down side of this is that TIFF files are large. For example, one RAW image from my 6.5 MB Canon EOS 10D, converted to TIFF, is a 50 MB image file! But hard disk space is relatively inexpensive and getting more so. My primary hard disk is 120 GB, and I will soon upgrade to a 250 GB disk.
3. Tonal and color editing. The next step in the workflow is to correct tone and color for print and web images. You can use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to correct the tonal settings, using the tonal value histograms (for R, G, and B channels), and the Curves feature. Consult any of the reference books above or the Photoshop manual for examples of how to do this. One particularly attractive feature of Photoshop CS in tonal editing of contrasty images with strong shadows and highlights, is to automatically bring up shadow detail and mute the highlights. This is done under Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlights. Photoshop has a steep learning curve, but start out using some of the simpler features and gradually learn how to use some of the more complex tonal and editing features. There are many dozens of books that have excellent tutorials.
4. Nori's step-by-step method. Ravi Shankar Nori has an excellent step-by-step description of how to process digital images from original to finished product. Click here for this outstanding illustrated website.