Digital Workflow – Update

Note: Here’s a handy article I first published last year in August. I’ve updated it with some new information.

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, you need to have a good working knowledge of how these applications (apps) work and can be integrated in to the way you process your images 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)TB (terabyte) is a thousand GB. (1)GB is a thousand MB. (1)MB is 1 million bytes or 1000KB. (1)KB is 1,024 bytes. Usually, 1 BYTE is equal to one character in a document. So, an average letter that you type of roughly 250 words takes up about 1 or 2 KB. If your images are 50MB each, you can fit literally thousands of them on a 64GB card. As a matter of fact, I just did the math and found out that you could fit 1,280 50MB images on a 64GB card. Think that’s enough space? But, 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 after the images are all downloaded to a computer. (If you are going on a long vacation, I would, of course suggest you bring at least a couple of cards. My average commercial corporate shoot is somewhere around 400 or 500 images). This becomes important if you have several shoots or assignments because when you begin a download, the process starts from the beginning (or end) of the card and downloads every single image. If you don’t erase your card after each shoot, you will be duplicating images and not only does it take up a lot of storage space on your hard drives, but it is really time consuming to delete the duplicates. Take it from me. Every once in a while I forget to erase old images. Needless to say, I don’t do it often.

So, in order to begin your workflow, you need a computer in addition to your digital camera. The computer should have at least 8GB of RAM (Memory) so that you can run all of your programs at the same time. You can get away with only 4GB of RAM but that might cause your programs to run slower than you might want them to. My computer can handle 16GB of RAM and that is approaching the minimum for pushing large image files around. 64GB is expensive, but will work much faster.

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. One thing I noticed about software is that it runs much faster the more you use it. It will automatically remember where the most used files are and that cuts down on workflow time substantially.

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 file on your computer 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 because it usually has a default place where it stores new images if a path is not usef-selected. 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

If you don’t do this, your computer will store the images randomly, probably in a folder called “Photos.” Then heaven help you if you’re trying to locate one specific image.

The above 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. You would know right where to find 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, as I mentioned,  than if you close it after use each time.

You might also have noticed that there are fewer CDs and DVDs around these days. That’s because Flash Drives or “Memory Sticks” that fit into a USB port are much faster at transferring data than a spinning drive. So, I usually keep a bunch of them on hand to download images to give to my clients. More often than not, I use a program called Dropbox to deliver my images to clients.

As I said, 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. By the way, I treat everything, and I mean absolutely everything I shoot as if it were a paying job. I went out the other day to shoot some flowers for a demo I wanted to do. I gave the job a name, a folder on the current hard drive I am using and a date. I know right where to find these shots if I need to use them for anything.

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 will the external drives.

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.