Digital Photo Workflow Evaluation
Now that I have my new Nikon D90 in hand, the volume of my photos taken has increased and I am giving some serious thought to my digital photo workflow. Previously, I didn’t really have an efficient workflow when I was working from film to online, so it is was all rather haphazard1. One week into the using my first DSLR, I’ve shot over 800 photos2 so a simple process would be needed for organization and getting my photos in a state that I’m happy to show them off, retrieve them and well, do things with them.
I found three articles online that have helped me with my initial thinking although in practice it remains to be seen how well it works.
For a little bit of history into digital workflows, I found it useful to read about how Sports Illustrated handled digital photos for the Superbowl back when digital photography was new in the mainstream. Rob Galbraith’s article on Sports Illustrated’s Digital Workflow was useful in identifying work process and the software utilized by the professionals. Software has moved on so some of the applications have incremented in version number since the article but it’s also useful to look for a particular feature (and why you need to) in a software applications that you might be considering.
The article also give you a good understanding of what format you could consider shooting in. Do you pick RAW or JPEG, or a combination of both in RAW+JPEG? From this, I liked the idea that you want to shoot dual RAW+JPEG, downloading both but working with the JPEG to view, manipulate and play around with. The RAW is archived until such time you want to adjust for publication either in print or online.
The second useful article is My Digital Workflow by Adam Tow. This provides a nice overview on how to break down your workflow into manageable chunks and is a good primer to begin your thinking. What I liked was the system of renaming your photos to something logical (e.g. year_month_day_time_XYZ) and why you would rename them as such. It also provides a good list of criteria you might want to consider when you come to annotating or tagging your photos. At the end of the article is another list of the software packages he uses.
The last article worth reading is Fraser Speir’s My Photo Editing Workflow. The first part of the article is perhaps not as strong in terms of importation methodology but provides a good suggested workflow for those using Aperture’s stacks. However, the most useful part of the article was Speir’s method of rating the photos to get to a good selection that you actually want to publish. He provides a useful set of questions to ask yourself when you are evaluating photos for a particular project.
Having digested some of these tips, I’ve got a rudimentary workflow in the making. Right now, I’m using the tools that were provided from Nikon. So far I’ve used Nikon Transfer and CaptureNX and which gets me to the third stage in Pier’s suggested evaluation process. I did however invest in a 500 GB external hard drive since both of my Macs are at less than 15 GB free space and shooting at RAW+JPEG is going to eat up 8 GB SD cards like no tomorrow.
I’m importing photos from my SD cards onto my Mac using the Nikon Transfer. This is a basic import utility and it can rename the files to something more useful rather than the default naming by the camera. It seems to pair up NEFs (Nikon’s native RAW) with the right JPEGs although it is hard to tell since Nikon Transfer needs to be upgraded to view the D90’s RAW files. I was a little annoyed that the date/time taken on the camera doesn’t factor into how Nikon Transfer transfers and sequences the renamed photos. This means that I’ve found photos to be all over the place from one batch of film.
Capture NX is strong and helps to organize photos and edit them. I haven’t used the editing features yet but rather used it as a method to evaluate my photos. Last night I successfully whittled 300 photos to 48 good 2-star shows which was fun. Hopefully tonight I can play some more with the features. So far what I saw was a handful of tools such as the noise reduction and the horizontal straitening too ((With lots of shots on wakeboard boats, the horizon is always at an angle.
These are some initial thoughts. I’ll post up more about this when I have had a chance to understand and work a little with my workflow.
- I spent so much time just scanning in photos that I eventually decided to have them scanned onto CD which just added to my cost that made it additionally prohibitive. [↩]
- Admittedly, this did have an F1 event included in this timeline [↩]
