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Digital Photography example workflow

By Dale Taylor (Intel) (47 posts) on February 6, 2009 at 4:42 pm

Image management has so many aspects and tools I felt a walk through of the methods and tools I use could be helpful.  I would appreciate your feedback and suggestions for ways to improve this process and possible additional tools to use. 

Image importer: this step copies the images to the computer, starting the organization process.  Names the folder and adds the copyright information to the EXIF portion of each image.  There are many applications that do this; I have been using the one that comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements.

ACDSee Image Browser: Using the image browser I add category tags and enable searching and sorting of the images when needed in the future.  I also move the dated folder into my file structure depending on its application, adding some details to the folder name while leaving the date intact.  Additional details for my naming methods are found in pervious posts: Photo Management with your Computer. Part 1 

Editing:  Several editing tools are used depending on the type of changes necessary.  My primary tools are:

Adobe Photoshop Elements.  I don’t spend the time necessary on images to use full Photoshop.  Elements gives me powerful editing tools and helps me clean up and adjust the images I do want to play with.  My most typical edits include resizing the image, cropping, and using the automatic image adjustments and the unsharp mask once I’ve resized an image.  Pretty simple stuff.  Occasionally I’ll make an artistic version of an image, such as shown here; original and then modified:

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.  When I want to adjust exposure and make some additional tweaks I’ve found Lightroom useful.  While it’s designed to be a workflow tool I haven’t liked the organization or database nearly as much as I have ACDSee. 

Photomatix Pro3.  When I want to make an HDR Image I like Photomatix Pro 3, it takes my variously exposed images and provides a nice process for helping me create HDR images.  An example below shows an original and then a modified image, all of which started with a single .jpg file taken on a recent trip to London.

iPhoto and iDVD. I enjoy making DVD’s of images and putting them together with music.  I’ve done this for friends to help them present their trips and other adventures in a public way.  iPhoto and iDVD on my MAC do a great job and are very easy to use. 

What are your favorite tools for these or other photography related tasks? 

Categories: Cool Software, Uncategorized

Comments (4)

February 6, 2009 6:42 PM PST jbc_kwang Total Points: 20 Registered User

WOo !

February 7, 2009 5:35 PM PST Paul Leroux

I use Canon SLRs, and I've found Canon Digital Photo Professional (Canon's raw converter) much easier to work with than Camera Raw in Photoshop Elements. With Digital Photo Professional, I can achieve a good overall balance of color temperature, contrast, saturation, sharpening, etc. very quickly. I then convert the edited raw file to tif, and use Photoshop Elements to fine-tune the tif file. And, as much as possible, I use adjustment layers in Elements to achieve "non-destructive" editing. Mind you, if I were shooting jpeg, I probably wouldn't use Digital Photo Professional (can't they think of a shorter name?) very much. But as a raw converter, it's great. It's also excellent at doing batch adjustments for a large number of photos. FWIW, - Paul

February 9, 2009 4:51 AM PST Yevgeny Rouban Total Points: 25 Registered User

I personally do not like Adobe LightRoom because it is very slow on my PC. SilkyPix is a bit faster.

February 9, 2009 8:54 AM PST Dale Taylor (Intel) Total Points: 8,424 Status Points: 7,924 Brown Belt

Paul, thanks for the note on Cannon's tools. Yevgeny, I agree you need to find the tools that work best with your system, with your other tools. Thanks for the mention of SilkyPix, I'll look into it.

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