Streamlining Your Workflow - Professional Photography -
Streamlining Your Workflow

By Jon Canfield 

If you’re anything like me, you are probably spending more time on the road and doing more of your initial image processing on a laptop in an effort to stay on top of the hundreds of images a typical shooting session generates. I used to just copy my images to something like the Epson P-5000, but now I always travel with a laptop and prefer to upload to that every evening. I travel with a Western Digital 320GB external drive that all my images are uploaded to.

My workflow tool of choice is Adobe Lightroom, which lets me import images directly to a location I specify, in this case the external drive, and assign keywords and other metadata to the images. After importing, I do a quick pass to delete the obvious bad shots (which I always seem to have plenty of).This works great for my field work, and saves me hours of time when I get back home. But, at home I work on a desktop computer, not a laptop. This is one of the reasons I settled on Lightroom. I can easily export all of my images as a catalog, including folders, keywords, and collections, from the external drive and then import them into my master catalog on the server. So, none of my field work is wasted, and I’m able to immediately start processing images for submission or web use.

 

There are plenty of other options out there, such as Aperture (Mac only), Microsoft Expression Media, even Adobe Bridge which is included with Photoshop, just to name a few. The key is to find a tool that you’re comfortable with and use it regularly, making it second nature to process your images every time you shoot. It’s more useful when you work on multiple computers, but even with a single computer, you’ll find that you are spending more time on shooting and image editing and less time on sorting and organizing them.

 

 


Posted 06-26-2008 9:07 PM by Eileen Fritsch
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