Friday, February 24, 2006

Instead of posting a photo today, I'm asking you to take some extra minutes and answer this question:

What is your digital workflow??

I really would like to know how everybody processes their work.

Thanks! And if you don't have time right now, please come back when you do have that extra minute.

9 comments:

DiaKL said...

:) Im waiting for the answers so I can learn some things :)
all the best :)

Anonymous said...

Short answer is: it depends. But in general:

1. Shoot only in RAW mode.
2. Open file in Adobe Camera Raw, adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, white balance as needed.
3. Open result in Photoshop CS2.
4. Use levels to remove any color cast, if needed, and do general contrast improvements (usually). I will try auto-levels in CS2 which i find to be effective, or I will work in each R, G, & B channel individually.
5. Do finetuning of image using curves adjustment--still trying to get a good handle on curves.
6. From here, it varies greatly based on what I want to do to a picture. Nothing set. Sometimes nothing more than what I've already, sometimes a lot.
7. I save this work as a PSD file.
8. Resize image for web.
9. Sharpen image.
10. Save as JPG for posting to web.

Rivi said...

1) Work on Rawshooter premium to convert raw into Tiff. Not too much changes done here.
2) Depending on what I intended the final result to be, curves, hue & saturation, Burning and finally sharpening on selected edges.

Hope this helps. Nice blog :)

Marc said...

Download. Crop to subject. Open with Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9. Adjust contrast, brightness, and white balance to liking.

I appreciate this question as I'm learning for when I have better equipment. I've been pleased with the helpfulness of many of the better blogs sharing their techniques in photography.

Thanks.

Patty said...

The amount of photos I take a day varies anywhere from 0-300. And on vacation or somewhere special, usually is a lot more.

I save my photos in organized dated folders on my computer. Look through them. Open any I see promising in Paint Shop Pro 7 whenever I have time or feel like it. Resize...or make the photo a b&w or crop the photo & then resize. Save the resized photo in another folder. I haven't done any other editing yet & I still need to check out other editing programs & learn more about photography & camera equipment.

For example: On my blog right now, the only photos I edited(besides resizing) are the Candy photo(cropped) & the 2 flower images at the top(both cropped). The rest are pure originals. No editing of color, etc.

I have thousands of photos saved on dvds & cds. I go back through these & the ones on my computer every so often & find photos I've forgotten about, etc. I have a folder of photos already edited to go on my blog, but my mind changes constantly on which photos I'll post for the next day. I try to post a variety in subjects & colors. There are so many photos I haven't even gotten around to editing.

Hope I answered your question right-I haven't had any sleep for a while.

Anonymous said...

Oh, I forgot something in my flow above. When I save the file in PSD format in Photoshop, I will add to the name of the photo the major processing steps that I have done beyond my normal adjustments. This way I know when I go back to look at a photo later the major steps that I did to the photo. Depending on the type of adjustment, I will usually try to do it in an adjustment layer or duplicate layer in Photoshop so I can easily remove the effect or change the opacity of that effect's layer to reduce its overall impact to the resulting image.

jason said...

Hey Jill,

I've been meaning to make a post on my digital workflow for a while. Your post gave me the motivation. Here's my digital workflow:
http://phototechnic.blogspot.com/2006/02/my-digital-workflow.html

What's yours?

Ali said...

Thats a good question Jill, made me think for a bit...

Anyways, I am the sort of person who does not want to drastically change the image in post processing. I like to keep it as much as it can be as it originally was. I would love to have pictures that are straigh out of the camera (that look good).

Unfortunately, I am not yet the pro that I always dream of one day becoming and nearly all my pictures require editing. I still try to keep them to the minimum.

My main editing program is Picasa, because it is fast and easy to use and gets most of the things I want done really easily. These include Brighness and Contrast, Saturation, Colour Cast etc.

In some rare cases in which I think Picasa is not getting the job done, I fire up PS. Nothing too spectacular here as well, just Curves, Levels and sometimes a few sharpening filters. Thats about the most I do.

You might think that I am a purist to think that Postprocessing destroys an image but thats how I am. In my opinion a well composed, simple image is much better than a silly shot that someone edited to make it look nice. Thats one of the reason I prefer Sam Javanrouh's "Daily dose of Imagery" over David Nightingale's "Chromasia". Both post shots that are out-of-this-world but Sam just processes them less. You can agree with me or disagree, either way I would like to hear what you have to say.

So there you go, my views on digital workflow. Hope they have not been to boring!

kasia & marcin said...

1. Shoot in RAW
2. Open in Gimp with UfRaw
3. In UfRaw apply one of the provia curves, correct exposure
4. Sometimes crop
5. Sometimes contrast mask
6. Contrast + brightness
7. Save as jpg
If picture goes for blog: resize and sharpening...