The term workflow has become quite the buzzword in photography over the past decade or so, and with good reason. It seems that we (digital photographers) spend more time messing around with images in cataloging applications like Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, Bibble, Aperture, etc. Personally I am not a huge fan of messing around with my photos on the computer, and conversely enjoy taking them. Don’t get me wrong, I love to sit in front of the computer screen all pasty eyed as much as the next guy, but in the end clicking a shutter is more fun than a mouse. From here I am going to outline my workflow from the time the card is inserted into the reader and stop when we get to the final product.
The Workflow
The first step I take is to make a copy of the memory card’s main directory. On my Nikons this the folder that is named 101NDXXX (where XXX is the camera model). This is done by simply dragging and dropping the folder to the desktop. After the copy process is complete I eject the card. This ensures that the contents of the card are not compromised regardless of what happens on the computer.
The next step is to import the photographs into your application of choice. After using Aperture for about a year, I switched to Lightroom and never looked at anything else. Aperture had some issues with handling the DNG format, which is actually the next topic.
I use the DNG format for my raw files. Some people agree some people become rabid with hatred when they hear the term DNG. The reason that I use DNG is not entirely because of the idea that NEF might become unreadable in the future. I use DNG because it allows increased interoperability between windows and macs. However, that is still not the major reason. The reason I began using DNG is because I wanted to losslessly compress D100 files. I then found out that another advantage of the DNG format is that the xmp sidecar data (which is one more thing to lose) can be stored inside of the DNG container. This allows my photo folders to remain nice and tidy as well as unify the file types that appear. DNG also allows users to use versions of Photoshop that predate their camera.
Lightroom allows users to convert to DNG on import, as well as tag images with keywords for searching later, and also to rename the files with useful names. I use the YYYYMMDD_sequence system. This ensures that if there is an issue with the Lightroom database, that I can simply go on and continue using an application like Bridge. The individual files are stored in folders that are named with YYYYMMDD and those folders are subfolders to YYYYMM which are subfolders to YYYY.
Once the photographs are all in Lightroom, I can begin sorting the files. I do not delete any files that may be of use someday. However, I do not find black frames, white frames, incredibly out of focus images, and incredibly shaky images to be of any use, so I flag these images as rejected. If an image stands out as excellent, and likely to be used for web or final print, I flag it. This leaves me with all of my picks being flagged, all of the keep but not amazingly useful images as unflagged, and all of the ready to be deleted images as rejected. After I finish sorting I hit command + delete which deletes all of the rejected photos. This serves to clear up space on hard drives as well as to speed up the process.
At this point I ideally burn a disc with all of the files that remain on it in two seperate folders, the picks and the rest. However, being human, I am out of sync with my burning. The disc burning makes a good rainy weekend or gradual before bed process. I do however maintain three synced copies of my images across three hard drives. One of which is portable (and travels with me) to help to protect against fire and other forms of environmental disaster.
At this point, when the files reside in at least two places other than the memory card, it is safe to format the card for reuse.
Now we can begin using Photoshop to enhance beyond the basic offerings of Lightroom and then move on to posting and printing images.