CameraCrazy

Digital photography has revolutionized the photographic processes. When film was the only way to take a picture, many photographers carefully planned their shots. Consider this, on the typical photo shoot, I often take roughly 300 pictures with my digital camera, if that was film my typical photo shoot would cost me about $170. I guess my point is that digital photography has allowed photographers to endlessly take pictures and experiment with different angles and settings until the shooter is happy. However, with the ability to take countless shots also means you will need a good organization system to keep track of all the pictures you take. Now there is no perfect way to organize photos, everyone has different reasons for taking pictures and have different priorities for what is important when organizing, but there are some general guidelines that likely apply no matter how you organize your pictures.

Below are suggestions on the key aspects of a workflow and examples of the workflow I tend to follow. The example workflow I use is an adaptation of the workflow episode on the Radiant Vista Podcast. It is more based towards Photoshop, however even if you’re not a Photoshop user the ideas behind organizing and the basic editing of photos does apply.

Setting up Your Workflow

I guess the first tip is to sit down and write out a plan of importance with respect to your photos. Ask yourself questions, what do you want to achieve? What are the important points you would like to organize by, date, location, subject type? Usually this would be done in a folder structure, but there are several ways to do it, do you dump all your photos into one giant folder, setup a more in-depth structure based plan, allow software programs to organize it for you (e.g. iPhoto). What ever folder structure you choose I would stress is however you decide to setup a folder structure, try and keep it consistent.

I’m typically a Photoshop user, so I have opted for a workflow from the Radiant Vista that has a main folder with the date and location and then two subfolders called RAW and Prints. The RAW folder as you may have guessed holds my original photos, the Prints folder will end up holding my photographs after they have been processed, edited and ready for printing.

Adding Your Photographs

The first and important steps are adding your photos, although this seems like a simple step of connecting your memory card and dumping the contents into the folders you just created, there are a few easy things to do that will make editing and finding your photos much easier down the road. The first thing I like to do is copyright my photographs which I do using Adobe Bridge. Copyrighting your photos is easy and smart thing to do and takes about 10 seconds to do no matter how many photos. The next easiest thing you can is scan through your shots and rotate them to the correct orientation, once again these are simple things to do that don’t take much time but will cut down your time when working on photos. So here is where it gets tough, KEYWORD YOUR PHOTOS! This is not really a tough thing to do, but can be a little time consuming with large amounts of photos, however the benefits of taking the time to do this will undoubtedly help you out months or years down the road when you’re trying to find a particular photo. A couple of short cuts that I use to help make the task a little easier is to batch keyword files. Chances are that a photo shoot will typically have overlap in the subjects of the photographs, for example if you spent the morning shooting birds then batch them with the word ‘Birds’ or whatever you deem appropriate. The other idea is to use generic keywords like ‘Wildlife’ or ‘Flowers’ to group your photos into more easily manageable groups. I use customized preset keywords that fit my organization setup. Also keep in mind that a photo can have more then one keyword and the more you add the easier it will be to narrow down a particular picture you’re looking for.

I consider the above steps the most crucial in the workflow and should be done shortly after the photo shoot itself when the details of each picture are fresh in your mind. Typically I like to leave my photos for a day or two before editing, partially because I’m either tired from the photo shoot or just not in a mood to sit in front of a computer for a long time editing photos. By ensuring you take the time to enter the details of your photos and the photo shoot, you can leave your photos for however long you want and still be able to come back and pull up your important details. I also like leaving my photos for a few days to allow the excitement of the photo shoot to wear off. Perhaps it’s just me but when taking pictures, I get fairly excited and quite biased as to the quality often over looking flaws with the photo, by leaving my photos for a few days gives me a chance to take a more accurate non-biased examination.

Purging, Minor Edits & Global Corrections

Once I’m ready to sit down to go through the photos, I often start with purging, minor edits and global corrections. A lot of photographers advocate never throwing out photos, I am not a fan of it. When I take photos, I often start the day with a few test shots, then take lots and lots of pictures. For a given static subject like a flower or landscape picture I will often take about 20 to 30 pictures, when photographing a moving subject like wildlife I often switch to continuous shooting and average around 60-90 shots for a subject. Needless to say the majority of these shots are garbage or in the case of continuous shooting nearly identical to the previous shot just taken. In my opinion this is a lot of repetition and useless files just taking up space. So the first thing I do is go through my photos and trash the bad photos and one copy of identical shots (I would suggest taking a close look when eliminating identical shots, sometimes, they will be similar however one has a certain aspect that makes it more attractive.

After I have gone through my photos and purged the next thing I do is minor edits, since these are more destructive edits I convert the RAW files into either a PSD (Photoshop), TIFF or JPG allowing me the option of going back to the original if needed. Minor edits are things like straightening horizons, cropping the photo and removing dust or other abnormalities that might have occurred. Global edits are next, these are adjustments that apply to the whole photo, such as adjusting shadows and highlights, exposure, contrasts, levels, saturation etc…

Spot Edits

The next thing is to go into more detail where necessary for edits to a photograph that don’t globally apply. The usual alterations often include things like saturating the sky, but not the foreground, lightening certain shadows, adding in other photos or major cloning.

Finishing Edits

The finishing edits are sharpening the photo, any additional cropping and removing existing layers that may have accumulated during the edits (in Photoshop terminally: flattening the image). Save this file to the Prints folder. I suggest not resizing your picture from the original attributes. When it comes time to print, then resize print and don’t save. Why don’t save? Well in my experience, I often save the photo as a 4×6 or some other small size, and later when I want to print a larger version I encounter pixelation. Remember you can always go from big to small, but not always the reverse.