Need Help With Workflow

JB
Posted By
Jonathan_Blumen
Jun 10, 2005
Views
300
Replies
10
Status
Closed
I really need some help with a "routine" workflow. I’m looking for a worklow that I can use on a regular basis that will allow me to acutally enjoy the photos I’ve taken. I spend so much time trying to figure out what to do with and to all of these photos that they pretty much stay on my computer.

Let’s say you come back from vacation with 200 photos and you want to put 50 of those photos in an album? What is your worklfow for editing those photos? Do they all need to be edited? I read a post on this forum regarding workflow that only 3-5 % of the edits you make to a photo actually make a difference.

Thanks!

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CW
Colin Walls
Jun 10, 2005
Which version of PSE do you have?
Windows or Mac?
Do you shoot RAW?
What exactly do you mean by "album" [paper, Web, CD …]?
JB
Jonathan_Blumen
Jun 10, 2005
I’m using PSE 3 for Windows
I’m not shooting in RAW
By album, I mostly mean paper, but I’m open to putting photos on web and cd
CW
Colin Walls
Jun 10, 2005
OK. My set up is pretty similar to yours. Just when I go on vacation, it’s more like 200 pics per day! 🙂

The best I can do is tell you what works for me [After >2 years with PSA/PSE]:

I import all the pictures into the catalog [directly from the camera]. I make sure they are all in the right folder – I have a simple month/year folder hierarchy. I quickly tag for location and subject matter.
I flick through one by one in Review mode [F11].
I dump any rejects [typically about 1 in 3] – I do this by tagging them Hidden [ALT/F2] and do the delete later.
I may give a star rating tag [1, 2 or 3] to any particularly good one.

I typically don’t edit a picture unless I have a specific purpose for it. If I edit, I use Organizer’s version sets.

There are 2 possible reasons to do an edit:

1) Composition – Cropping, background blurring, retouching…

2) Correction – Exposure etc.

If you find you are editing for (2) on every picture, something is wrong. Either your camera or the way you are using it is faulty.

If I am using images for a "project", a Web gallery for example, I will use a collection to group and order the images.

Guess that sums it up.
Any help?
BB
Barbara_Brundage
Jun 10, 2005
If you find you are editing for (2) on every picture, something is wrong. Either your camera or the way you are using it is faulty.

Dunno about that, Colin. I guess it depends on picky you are, but I’ve never seen a digital photo from any camera run by any photographer that couldn’t benefit from at least minimal post processing.
BB
Barbara_Brundage
Jun 10, 2005
Ah, I see now. Yes, if you always find that things are really wonky in your photos, something is wrong.
CW
Colin Walls
Jun 10, 2005
I’ve never seen a digital photo from any camera run by any photographer that couldn’t benefit from at least minimal post processing

But why is that? Cameras contain so much processing power that they should be able to deliver fairly optimal images. With film, 99.99..% of prints were made from the negs without anyone messing with the enlarger. What’s changed?
BB
Barbara_Brundage
Jun 10, 2005
For one thing, if you just take your images as the camera gives them to you, you have to accept all the camera’s decisions about saturation, sharpening and so on.

Another thing is that you can easily adjust things you had to live with in film days if you didn’t want to do a whole lot of work. Even with film, when I worked in advertising we never sent out an image without a heck of lot of tweaking. The difference was when it was done–the color separators did a lot of the kind of color correction you can do with PS/PE, and I still miss my big set of grayscale paints for retouching. That was fun.
LM
Lou_M
Jun 10, 2005
In terms of PSE, one advantage of Raw is that you can apply the same settings (exposure, brightness, shadows, etc.) that you’ve chosen (as opposed to auto settings in Process Multiple Files) to a group of related pictures.

With non-Raw images in PSE, there’s no easy way to do that.
JB
Jonathan_Blumen
Jun 10, 2005
I have multiple books on PE3, but they seem to neglect what to do and when. I’m at the point where I want to start printing, arranging and enjoying my photos and find myself asking questions like, "Do I need to do this manual levels balancing procedure using the histogram with all of my photos?" Thanks for the reply!
BB
Barbara_Brundage
Jun 10, 2005
Hi, Jonathan. Well, that depends on you. Do you think they need something? If they do, then yes. If you think they’re fine as is, then no. The only kind of a sort of a rule is that it’s usually best to save sharpening for a last step, after other edits, and there are exceptions to that one, too. That’s why books aren’t more decisive about your workflow. There are as many different workflows as there are people using the program.

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