Digital Imaging Workflow

Setting up and maintaining an effective workflow and storage structure is essential when working with digital images. At the moment I have just under 11 000 images that need editing and all of them are at different stages in the process. When I have finished with them – deleting junk (VERY important), setting the RAW conversion parameters, adding captions and then key words – they will need to be sorted into one of 350 different categories and join some 25 000 existing images in our image bank. There HAS to be a system! To try to do this without one is a nightmare.

So, here is what I do:

I have 3 hard drives that I work with on a daily basis (I’ve actually got many more but this is specifically for dealing with images). My working drive is a 500gig external drive and then I have 2 X 1 Terra Byte external drives for backing up the images. Normally the backup drives are switched off and are only used when I need to access the files or backup new images. In the field, I have 2 X 250 gig USB drives onto which I save images. These are small, light and do not need their own power supplies.

Whatever we are busy with I ultimately end up transferring the pix to a folder on my working drive on my desk top machine. I have set up 2 folders – Editing To Do and Processed. The folders in the Editing To Do folder vary, depending what we are busy with but at the moment they go something like Berg NEF, Berg DNG, Durban NEF, Durban DNG, iSimangaliso DNG, iSimangaliso DNG and so on…

Then:

1. I either copy the pix to an existing NEF folder or create a new one if necessary.

2. Once all the images have been copied across I then rename them. The actual name you give them is unimportant – it is just there to give each image a unique number. The file names that cameras dish out are usually limited to a maximum of 9999 and once this is reached it starts again at 1. This can cause HUGE problems with duplicates so it is best to set up your own numbering system. I’ve tried “intelligent” numbers that include date and subject codes but maintaining these is a complete pain and all this data is available in the image EXIF information anyway. I just started at 300 000 and worked up from there.

3. When the images have been renamed I copy them to both the backup drives.

4. The images that are in the NEF folder are then imported into Adobe Lightroom with no preset settings and exported as a DNG file to an appropriate DNG folder. The alternative is to simply convert the files to DNG files using Adobe DNG converter but until very recently this program did not handle my Nikon D3x files so I had to go the Lightroom route. This conversion is not strictly necessary as it is perfectly fine to work with the raw files from your camera and if you are shooting jpegs then you can skip this step completely. There are, however, some benefits to working with DNG files.

5. The DNG files are imported into Lightroom with appropriate “Develop” and Metadata presets.

6. I then work through the images checking the exposure (using the histogram), sharpness at 100% and composition.

7. The images that I like are tagged and the rest are deleted (remember, I’ve backed up all the NEF files onto the 2 X 1 TB drives).

8. Now the editing work starts in earnest. Every image is checked for: exposure, contrast, black clipping, highlight clipping, brightness, chromatic aberration, noise reduction, vignetting, dust spots, colour balance, clarity, vibrancy and saturation. Changes are made as and where necessary.

9. In Lightroom, a suitable caption is added answering the following: What is it? (Including scientific name where appropriate). What is it doing? And where is it doing it? In addition all the other necessary IPTC data is added and/or modified.

10. Again in Lightroom, appropriate keywords are added.

11. The files are then exported into a temporary folder as highest quality, non-interpolated JPEG’s.

12. This folder is opened in Adobe Bridge and the keywords are fine-tuned.

13. Using an “action” in Photoshop these images are then resized to 425 pixels (the size of the low res files we send out as selections to clients) on the long side and a www.africaimagery.com watermark is added.

14. The High res JPEG’s are then copied to a folder where we store these

5. The processed low res files are moved to appropriate folders in the image bank.

16. Both the High Res JPEG’s and the Image Bank are backed up.

The Africa Imagery Catalogue has a structure similar to the one below. Obviously there are many more categories in the catalogue but it’s the principle that’s important. Develop a structure along similar lines that suits your needs.