digital workflow habits

[Jredtugboat]

Hi all,

As I'm anticipating a visit from Father Christmas sometime soon, I'm starting to think about how I'm going to handle all the RAW files and the related post-processing. I'm wondering how y'all are dealing with it.

First, what do you do for sharpening? I confess that the sharpening is a new territory for me. Do you by and large use Photoshop Cs/Elements for Unsharp Mask? And what settings do you typically use? (A very kind board member here forwarded to me his unused copy of PS Elements 2; I've been experimenting with it to some degree.)

Once you're finished sharpening, how do you deal with keywording/tagging? I notice that programs like Elements 3 and Picasa 2 can tag photos, but do these tags go into an EXIF space or are they proprietary, and will be lost if I look at the same photo on someone else's computer?

Just curious...I'm looking at the 10K + photos I have from my current camera and I want to do a much better job of organizing my new ones...

Julian

[ReF]

try 37k. with this much, i only process the really good ones or the ones that need to be printed. for those groups of vacation shots or those that other people want to see (meaning large volume), i generally try to process them as close to perfection as i can in RAW conversion and avoid photoshop. the ones that need a little more attention get very simple PS work, like applying a simple curves gradient or blending two files processed differently from the same RAW file. if you are going to be doing extensive post processing work, whether on one or several files, save yourself some time and do everything in layers (i'm not sure if elements 2 allows this, if it doesn't, it's worth your time and money to get elements 3). having control over layer opacity and gradients will greatly increase your capabilities and ease of use - that alone is worth the price of an upgrade. if you decide to make changes to already processed photos later, layers allows you to make changes to specific layers, not the whole thing. sometimes i think i'm finished with a file, then later on i look at it and decide it needs more work - layers save me time and frustration. this may happen a lot if you are new and learning new skills all the time. BTW layers will kill your disk space but IMO is worth it. good luck. oh yeah, do yourself a favor and get a good photoshop book.

[Jredtugboat]

37k photos? Sheesh. That's an awful lot. So you can see why I'm in need of a system to organize all this stuff.


...<snip>for those groups of vacation shots or those that other people want to see (meaning large volume), i generally try to process them as close to perfection as i can in RAW conversion and avoid photoshop.

Ok, and by 'process them as close to perfection as I can in RAW conversion', what characteristics, specifically, are we talking about processing? Do you mean color temperature? Cropping? More?


oh yeah, do yourself a favor and get a good photoshop book.

Okay--any suggestions? Because the last time I went to B&N the Photoshop section was so large I got lost, then disheartened, and went to read a book on Pembroke Welsh Corgis instead! :)

thanks,

yours,

Julian

[ReF]

actually for processing in RAW it's usually just the EV that i touch. sometimes contrast needs toning down if it's a high contrast scene, but usually i process two files from one RAW in those situations and blend. if it's REALLY high contrast i usually know when to bracket for blending. white balance problems are rare and i usually leave the saturation and sharpness at +1 (those values may be different on your camera). sorry, no suggestions for books. by the time in realized how much info was out there on photoshop i had already learned most of the "basic" techniques through the net or figured them out from experimenting. EDIT: what i mean to say is don't do what i did. it's a lot easier and faster with everything in one reference book. you can even look through the book to see what you haven't tried yet. the way i learned photoshop, i didn't even know what i was missing. i'm browsing through a few advanced tech PS books myself to see which i want to buy, so i don't have any recommendations at the moment.