Digital Photography - Above and Below Water -
Page 5A - 2006 Revised Work Flow

I have now been shooting digital for over three years and in that time, my work flow has changed and I would like to pass on some of the solutions to problems that I have encountered and changes in my software choices. The changes in software are personal and you may or may not agree on what I use or why I use it. That is why they have so many different software programs to choose from.

I still shoot all my digital SLR files in the Raw mode. This allows me to set the white balance and make changes to exposure and color balance in the computer. It also gives me a digital original that I can return to and update if better conversion software comes along or if I just get better with the computer. I have skipped some of the information that already exists on page 5 about why I shoot raw and the other format choices available. You can review page 5 to get that info.

Dive / Photo Log:

One of the first things that I did was modify my dive/photo log to accommodate digital photos. I have changed my log over the last few year. I am using Nitrox now so I have added a box for EAN percentage. If you look at my last log, I have taken out the start and ending number for the photos. I never remembered to fill it in. I also took out the number of shots. It was another thing that I never used. I took out film type but I am going to add in ISO as I plan on using different ISO settings this summer, especially in wide angle shipwreck and artificial reef photos here in New Jersey. I have an example of my dive / photo log below:

Work Flow

After I download my photos into my computer, I place them in a general folder, for example, "Raw 2006" with a subfolder "New Jersey Underwater", then a sub folder of the dive site location with date. An example is "Veronica M - 6/24/06." I convert the raw files to tiff files using Adobe Photoshop CS2's Raw Converter. I used to rename the raw files first so that they had the same file number (except for the suffix (.nef vs. .tif) as the finished file. I stopped doing that and after the last month of working on my raw vs. tiff files, I may resume again. The tiff file is saved into another main folder, "Converted Tiffs 2006" with a sub folder of "New Jersey Underwater" and then finally "Veronica M - 6/24/06." This is where I have made the first of two mistakes in my workflow. Here are the two problems that I have run into. First, I don't always get to convert all the raw files in a folder to tiff files. That is okay because I can always go back and do them at another time, especially during the winter when I have more time. That is all fine and dandy if I knew which files where converted and which were not. Over the last month, I have spent countless hours comparing raw and tiff files to see which files had been converted and which had not. What a royal pain that was.

Before I started the process, I had to come up with a plan for marking the raw files to show which were updated and which were not. To make the process harder, I do another step in my workflow that makes the comparison more difficult. At the end of each year, I take all the tiff files for that year and put them into category folders. Fortunately, two things happened in my work flow that has helped me solve this problem. First is Adobe Bridge, a file browser, that is part of Adobe Photoshop CS2. It has a function called "Ratings" and "Labels". Ratings allows me to assign a value of one to five stars to each file. Labels allows me to assign a label color to each file. The label color can be named to help me remember what I am using each color for. I chose the "blue" label and renamed it "Converted" to tell me that any raw files (or jpeg's) if I was shooting in jpeg and converting to tiff that had a blue label were converted.

The second bit of help that I received was when my database program, IMatch, was upgraded to a new version that supported the Adobe labels. I can now see the labels in Adobe Bridge or Photoshop CS2. I used the label rating for another process in my work flow. At one point, many of my tiffs are converted to jpeg's and put onto my web site. I need to know which files I have on the web so I can know which new ones to upload. I now assign a red label that I changed to "On The Web" to the tiffs that I have put on my site. I have not updated all my files to reflect this new label but it is something that I will chip away at until I have caught up.

This worked just fine but it took a long time to go through the folders and find out which images were processed from raw and which were not. While doing this, I found a great number of images that had never been processed. If I had not gone through this laborious process, I would not have known that these images had not been processed and may have been lost due to shear volume at some point in time. I am now making one more change to my workflow. All new images are going into a folder called "Unprocessed Raw 2006" with the same sub folders as shown above. Once all the images in the folder have either been processed or deleted, the folder remains in the "Unprocessed" main folder.

I hope that the mistakes that I have made in my work flow will help you find a work flow that will work for you. There are plenty of other ways to handle files and I am sure that there are many that are better than mine. If this doesn't do anything else, perhaps it will get you to think about your work flow and how best to design it. Now for my last bit of advice. Make sure that you have back ups of all your files. I have two external hard drives that have backups of my internal drive that holds my image files. See Section 18 to find out more about my back up system.