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Every digital photographer who takes his photography seriously have a process which they will follow after taking their photos. This is referred to as the digital workflow, and different photographers will have different processes to get to the results they want. Some digital workflows are highly technical and involves different machines and softwares costing thousands of dollars, others involves nothing more than downloading free software like Picasa from Google and taking it from there. There isn’t really a right and wrong way as long you manage to get the images you need.
I thought it will be interesting to show you a bit of my own digital workflow, which is by no means exemplary or remarkable. However, I think this will help to explain to some of you why I take so long to process the photographs after I take them and why I cannot immediately give you the photo on the spot. So here goes.
STEP ONE
People with a Digital SLR usually takes their images in RAW format. Of course there are many people who takes their photos in JPEGs, but these people probably don’t care too much about quality. As I am using my Canon 20D (which I hope to upgrade by the end of the year YAY!), the RAW file format is the Canon CR2 files. After I get back from a shoot, I will use a card reader to transfer all the files and directory structure from the Compact Flash card into my computer.
STEP TWO
A digital workflow usually involves a software program or two to help you manage and edit those photos you have taken. A professional software like Capture One Pro will cost you $800. I use the educational version of Adobe Lightroom which is cheaper at $150. I have Lightroom installed in my computer and I would then import in all the photos into the program. Lightroom does not does not actually touch your files while you are editing it. What it does is that it saves all the edit instructions for that photo into a small xmp file which is attached to it. In order to get the final image, you will have to export it out of the program.
STEP THREE
One of the main uses of a tool like Lightroom is to help you manage your photographs. So the first step after importing in all the photographs (which can take a hour or more if you have taken thousands of photos) is to sort through the photographs. I shot about 800 photos for Founder’s Day and the Handbell’s concert. Since I will never have the time to individually edit all 800 of them, therefore I will need to mark out all the photos worth editing from the spoilt ones. My method involves rating the ones I want to keep from 1 to 5 stars and then flag those photos which are not so important so I can come back to them again later.
STEP FOUR
After I have shrunk the selection down to the good ones (probably like a 100+ photos now), then I will start to edit them in Lightroom. This is the Lightroom editing interface, which allows me to crop, rotate, remove red eye and spots, edit colour temperature, edit the light/dark and contrast, edit the tone curve, edit the saturation, edit the sharpness and noise removal, correct for lens distortion, change to black & white or duotone, etc. It covers most of the things that a photographer will need to do on his photo anyway.
HAVE A LITTLE DANCE!
After this is done, I will export the images out again as JPEG files, and this time with all the changes made in the program. This is another long wait as the program will process every picture that I have selected one by one. Sometimes this is not the last step of the workflow. When I am shooting at high ISO settings like 1600 or 3200 and the image turns out to be very noisy and grainy, I will export out the photos as TIFF files (which are huge files) and filter these images again through an intelligent noise removal program like NeatImage. This is a batch process so I will have to wait a bit more.
Finally, there is another group of photos where I would get down to individually retouching the filtered images on Photoshop. These are usually the paid jobs I do for other people. This is where I do all the time-consuming stuff like digital cosmetic surgery on faces and nips and tucks to improve your flabby muscles.
I hope after you have read this that you are now dying to become a photographer when you grow up. Yeah.
