Digital Workflow

Digital Workflow

By William Lulow

What is “digital workflow?” These days, it describes a number of different applications all working together to produce images you can use for publication, printing or sharing as well as documents used for the same purposes. It involves the back-and-forth usage of files that will all help you produce the images you need for the work you are doing.

That’s it in a nutshell. However, to be able to do all this work, you need to have a good working knowledge of how these applications (apps) work. And, you need to be able to switch between each of them quickly. So, let’s start at the beginning. If you are a photographer, you are, most likely using a digital camera that captures images on some kind of device called a “card.” These cards can be either Compact Flash Cards or SD Cards (smaller). They come in various capacities from 2GB (gigabytes) to roughly 128GB. (There are some larger and some smaller, but probably the most common are the ones around 64GB. If you have a 20MP camera or something thereabouts, you can safely figure on each image taking up about 30 to 50 MB (megabytes). Now just for comparison’s sake, (1)GB is a billion bytes. (1)MB is 1 million bytes. (1)KB is 1,024 bytes. Usually, 1 KB is equal to one letter in a document. So, an average letter that you type of roughly 250 words takes up about 2 or 3 KB. If your images are 50MB each, you can fit literally thousands of them on a 64GB card. I recommend using at least a card of this size. You will never run out of space on the card if you erase the entire card each time the images are all downloaded to a computer.

So, in order to begin your workflow, you need a computer in addition to your digital camera. Then, you will need some software to handle the images that you download. The most common is Adobe Photoshop which comes bundled with Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge when you lease the programs. Yes, that’s right “lease.” You cannot buy these programs on discs anymore. The rental fees are approximately $10.99 per month on a yearly basis. The good news about this arrangement is that you will get constant updates whenever they are available, which ensures that you will always have the latest version.

You then have to learn how to download your images to your computer before you can do anything with them. It is a fairly straightforward process, but you need to learn the steps involved. One of the steps that is probably the most important is to select a destination folder on your computer to which you will save the files each time you download images. If you aren’t careful with this, it could take you quite a while to locate your pictures once they are transferred from the camera to the computer. So, you need to develop a storage system that keeps track of all of your downloaded pictures. The system I use is as follows:

            PHOTOGRAPHS2018 (Main folder for all images in a given year)

                        -January

                                    -Aunt May’s Party

                                    -Mom’s Birthday

                                    -XYZ Corporation

                                                -XYZ Corporation Interiors

                                                -XYZ Corporation Headshots

                        -February

                        -March

This might be a typical way to start a filing system. You would then pick an appropriate folder on your computer’s hard drive, then select DOWNLOAD on your program’s menu, and all those pictures would be saved to that folder’s location. You would then be able to retrieve them when you wanted to edit or print them.

This is the basic method for storing images to ensure that you can find them whenever you want. The images are downloaded either directly from the camera using the wire supplied with the camera or from a card reader you can purchase that plugs directly into your computer. There is always a “back-and-forth” between the programs you use to edit, store and label your images. I always keep all the programs I am using open and placed on the taskbar of my computer’s desktop. I find that images open up much faster if you are constantly using a program than if you close it after use each time.

The other thing I do regularly is to erase my 64GB SDHC card after all its images have been downloaded and saved in the correct folder. That way, each time I begin a new shoot, whether it is just my own personal images or those of a client, I have them stored in their own folder so that they can be retrieved quickly. One further thing I have done is to purchase several EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES.

All images are stored in them rather than on the computer’s hard drive. So, if something should happen to my main computer, nothing will happen to the image files and they can be readily accessed by a backup laptop while the desktop is being fixed. I have also been using the CLOUD lately via an “iCloud” account from Apple. Redundancy is the key to never losing your images. We live in a digital world now and you have to protect the files you store. I was taught something from a computer expert a few years ago. Computers are machines and they will eventually break down or need fixing.

So, I’m often going from Adobe Bridge which I use to download and store my images, to Photoshop to edit single ones and to Lightroom to process several images at a time with things like METADATA, labeling and putting copyright stamps on photographs before I upload them to the website. I also incorporate my iPhone into the workflow as well. I often photograph lighting setups I use for particular jobs. Those I keep on my iPhone and transfer (again via my iCloud account) to my computer. I save those in separate folders within my job folders and they are labelled as “shooting images.” If I want to use any of them to illustrate lightings I write about on my blog, they are right where I can access them easily.

The “workflow” as I said, goes between the various programs (applications) used to download, store and edit the various images I use for various purposes. It is just something you need to get used to. In my particular case, I happen to think that Adobe Bridge is an easier program to use than Adobe Lightroom. Maybe that’s because I got it first, but I’m constantly having to remind myself with Lightroom that the program doesn’t delete or add any files to your system. It only edits them (unless you want it to do more).

Workflow is extremely important to digital photographers today. Even with all my attention to where I place my images, I still wind up hunting for a certain image from time to time.