Photo workflow

Somebody at NikonCafe.com asked me about my photo workflow, so here it is. It is not the definitive answer obviously as I'm not a professional, but it works for me.

I mostly shot as JPEGs, not raw except in very few occasions.

• I always first do a quick pass over all the series after a shoot and delete the bad ones.

• I copy all remaining to a temp folder in a second drive.

• Then do a second pass to analyze what's decent in more detail. Maybe delete a few more, else just archive in primary drive (I have two internals) in a folder named for the shooting locale.

• Next copy the candidates for my gallery to a working folder.

• Pass each one through Paint Shop Pro 9 and apply my standard changes:

• Crop

• Straighten horizon if needed

• Clone out undesired areas. This is sometimes easy, sometimes a lot of work, (e.g. garbage cans, light poles, flag poles, telephone wires, etc.)

• Noise reduction, sometimes with PSP 9 if it is a small job, other times with "Neat Image" plugin

• Fix levels and/or add layers: 'Multiply' to darken, or 'screen' to lighten, and reduce layer opacity to suit

• Merge (flatten) layers

• Un-sharp mask
  

• Change brightness/middle tones/contrast, if needed

• Save the newly fixed image with the same filename and appending a letter 'a' as the first version

• I anotherr interim version needs to be saved for further processing (like B&W), save it as version 'b' and so on

• Candidates for B&W go through my BW actions which are generally done through Channel Mix

• Some B&W I do through desaturation when I want to desaturate all but one color (I've done a few of those)

Then I finish by reducing size to 800 on a side for posting online and (sometimes) adding a frame and my name, which is done by another action and saved as yet another letter-version.

Sounds complicated. but all except for the cloning is very fast as it is done with actions stopping at every dialog to sometimes adjust a level, else just accepting my pre-set defaults. (e.g. Channel Mix at 43-33-33). It takes a few minutes per photo.

Once a day or so I use 'Beyond Compare' (excellent and very economical program to copy all new and updated files to the secondary drive as a backup). Every so often I burn a CD for safekeeping. I also every week or so, use Beyond Compare to copy to my wife's Hard Drive which she does not use much, and is in the home LAN (Windows XP).