Photography

Digital negatives require certain processing, so much that the term "workflow" has been employed to describe how you get from making the exposure in the camera to publishing the photo on your computer or the web, or printing it onto paper.

Here I describe my digital image workflow that I use for the Canon 1D MarkIII

I've never been keen on downloading images to a computer using a tethered camera.  I have always used a card reader, which comes built in to most new computers, and flat panel monitors.  Although we started with just Compact Flash (CF) media, now there are many media formats.  The 1DmIII uses both CF and Secure Digital (SD) and SD high capacity cards.  The SDHC format is a problematic as few built-in readers can recognize the format.  I use a little USB reader that came with the 4Gb card.

Cataloging and storing digital images:

"Standard photo processing:"

1. If necessary I crop, rotate or adjust perspective.  This is usually rare, especially for the main gallery photos since I'm trying to show only those images I pre-visualized successfully.
2. I adjust levels, color balance and saturation manually in PS7.
3. I then reduce the image to the size for the gallery, to 600x800 pixels, or 480x640 more recently.
4. I nearly always sharpen these resized images using Fred Miranda's IntelliSharp action for PS7.01.
4'. I tried sharpening, then resizing, from a suggestion on a forum.  I have done some experiments, reported elsewhere on my web (link below), but mostly I just resize, then sharpen.
5. I then save as a JPEG with little compression (10 or 11 on PS scale) resulting in an image of about 200-400 Kb.
6. The 90x120 thumbnail is made using an action I recorded.  This makes setting up the database of images and thumbs much simpler.

Image sharpening gets a lot of bad press, perhaps more than any other digital manipulation.  I think a lot of people feel it's cheating.
I remember when I used film cameras, and I was obsessed with image sharpness.  And back then the way to get it was to use the best quality equipment, especially lenses that I could afford, use a tripod, use Tri-X or T-Max film, work hard with development chemicals, then use the best enlarger optics I could afford.  Mmm, now let me compare that to sharpening digital photographs in PhotoShop...

A note about photo galleries

My philosophy regarding photo galleries has two elements: photos should be easy to view, with simple navigation, and they should be offered in the highest reasonable quality.  This means large images, but not too large that slow loading sends viewers away in disgust.  Computers are about speed, and slow web sites are a royal pain.  Site navigation is very important, and I have a personal hatred of dead-ends on webs that require me to back out.   My goal is to never require my viewers to use the browser's back button!