Digital Workflow

A well structured work flow is really important because not only will it help you keep tabs on where you've put your images it will also help you manage in which the way that you work through them, hence the word 'workflow'. Everybody's going to have their own preferred way of doing things, for example my friend and colleague Bella West showed me the way she did things, i adopted her system and then over time it kind of evolved and changed shape a bit to the way I like to do things. So what I'm going to do is to show you the way I do things and explain why I do them the way I do them, and may you make a few suggestions to how you might want to change the way I work to suit yourself. I've got some image files on here, on a flash card out of my camera which I will be loading in in a minute, but before we do that we've got to make a place to put them, we've got to create a workflow for those images to go into.

So if I. Open up the hard drive where I keep my  image files you'll notice that everything has a
number followed by a name, this one here for example thatch cottage one two three six thatch cottage, its job number one two three six and the client is the thatch cottage restaurant, I need a file number because I do it for a living. If the thatch cottage were to phone up and say "Mike, I need a copy of image number one two three six fifty five" I don't know what that one is, er I can very quickly locate it. If they were to say "you know the plate of food you took a picture of by the kitchen you know it was quite nice with a flower on the table" Oh well I don't know which one they're talking about, so i need to do it according to a file
numbering system.

One, two, three, six, fifty five I think I said, Let's go and find it. In here you'll see there are some more folders, there's one called 'Negs' one called 'processing', one called 'proof' one's called 'thatched cottage raws' and then there's one here called 'finals' and that's where I put my final images. I'm just gonna go and see if I can locate that fifty five wasn't it? Fifty seven, fifty six, fifty five, there it is. So there is, one two three six fifty-five, It's a lovely delicious looking plate full of smoked salmon with filo pastry, mm.

Before we go and put our images off of the flash card onto the hard drive I need to make a folder for those images, let's do it. So I right click on here, new, folder, the next number in the sequence for me is one two three six, one two three six of the last one so one two three seven will be the next one. What's the job? It's workflow, so I use an under score and then workflow. You may wish to use this slightly different system for example you might
want to say uh...

I don't know, do it by date for example you might want to put uh... April two thousand and eleven, lake district because you shot some landscapes up there, or maybe you want to call it something like august two thousand and eleven, er weekend at the beach, or whatever it may be. You could put numbers before the date if you wanted, sort of double o one, double o two double o three so if you wanted to go back in time and then you'll kind of be able to find things probably a bit better, quicker and easier. Anyway inside here we need to put our Negs and Raws and finals folders and I have them preprepared in a folder here called 'folders'.

Imaginative ay. Inside there are those folders, there's nothing in them, they're empty, and just because I'm lazy and I'd rather copy and paste these into my job folder rather than keep creating them each time over and over and over again. Now we have a place to put them, so each plug-in the flash card and get the images of it, notice I don't use any specific download the software, because I know different cameras come with it and you can buy it, I just find it easier to do it this way using the computers own windows system or mac file browse or whatever it is called. Open up the folder with the pictures in on the flash card, there they are.

Notice these are all Jpegs, so therefore I'm gonna put them into the
'negs' folder. The raw folder in my workflow will be for raw files, if I shot raw files, I'd put the raw's into the raw files folder and then I'd go and edit them bin out the ones I don't want and then re-number them and then I'd process them into Jpegs but we're leaving that step out because I've put these directly in Jpegs to stop this film from becoming ridiculously long. Let's copy these Jpegs and I'm gonna put them into this one here called the negs folder, I call it negs because this is where I put my original image files. When i say original image files I mean they're gonna be Jpegs or tiffs or they might be Photoshop psd's, raw files are not original image files, they're more like a data file which you then convert into an image file later on.

More on that somewhere else. So let's assume that I've shot some raw's and I've converted them into Jpegs and I'd put them into the negs folder but in this case I'm going straight to negs, so I've just got some Jpegs here. The next thing i want to do is to sort them out, I've taken them from the camera, I've put them into a negs folder and I now want to edit them, I don't want to be working on image files that are out of focus or I don't like the composition or I think oh that's not very good, I want to edit them now before I start getting in to post production or any of that stuff. To do that I use a little program called breeze browser, let's start her up, here we go, there are many different types of uh...

File browser system, you could use something complex and uh... Like adobe bridge which a superb piece of software and you can add meta tag data to image files and all sorts of exciting things. I tend to use breeze browser a lot, it's a cheap piece of software but it works really well particularly if you're just
working with some Jpegs, it's very very fast and very very simple. Let's open this up and go and find our pictures.

So we go into my computer the D drive because that's where I keep them, business 'cause that's where i put my
image files because I do it for a living. Workflow folder there is I expand that and inside the negs folder, click okay, here's our pictures. You may notice that their old laying on
their side is because produce proof all sometimes the client
these parties you think about prices smaller images that all the same way
that will dot where or on their side, don't worry about that for the minute we're just going to take a look at the pictures and make sure that they're nice and sharp and I want them and that's quite nice but I like blue sky behind. I'm just quickly having a look to see what's what, that looks a little bit soft to me, aw no that's very soft, what I'm going to do is delete that, it's soft I don't want it, it's not sharp, it's pointless to keep it.

Let's say I'm going to keep all of those, I've done my edit, I've sorted out what I want there, oh and by the way I can also change the image order here, I might think oh actually I want to put that one up here, so I can drag that up to the top there like this and change the image order and put it up at the top, there we go. Now I'm gonna re-number them to suit the job number, so I just select them all, just shift click to select them all and I go to tools and I go batch rename, I've already got a little thing set up here so it's one, two, three, seven I've already typed it in earlier to save time. I want to, all of them as I've displayed them, remember I've changed the order so I'm gonna click this little thing here as displayed, and as you can see it's got a little list of the image files there, I think I must have missed one because yeah I've missed a few, look they weren't all there, let's do it again. There we go, that should have got them all, tools, batch rename, yeah that's got them all filed.

Here we go, I want them as displayed, that's the order I want them in, I want the first image number to be one, and I'm going to use three digits, reason is I rarely shoot more than hundreds of image, I don't usually go into the thousands, if I was then I'd have to change that to four digits. As you can see down here, this is the original file name and it's now going to change it into my numbered file name, all I. Have to do is click rename, and selected and look, all down here you can see it's changed these file numbers. Job done in breeze browser, that's all I use it for.

Now I, let's say I'm going to do a little bit of post production, I'm going to take one of these images, or all these images in fact and I'm going to go through them and tweak the colours and get the very best I can from the image file. First thing I'm going to do is open them up in Photoshop and there's lot's of ways of doing it, let's just pull Photoshop up, I use Photoshop because it's you know, it's the kind of brand image editing leader. Uh... There's different ways of opening them, you can go file open and then go and find them, but I'm lazy so I tend to just have my folder here with the image files in and then I just drag them in like that, and Photoshop will open them all up.

I'm not going to process all of these because you don't need to see me do it, I'm just gonna do one and I'm gonna choose one that I'm gonna do, I probably should have chose one I'm gonna do in breeze browser, I don't want that one, do I want that? I quite like that, that's short listed and not that one close, I don't want that one because I don't like the blue sky, It's between those two, uh... Let's go with that one there shall we. Right I'm just gonna quickly do the post-production so this isn't about post production, I'm just gonna turn that the right way so that I can see it easily. I use keyboard commands a lot as you might have noticed.

Lot's of blue in this because I did it in a hurry, and I didn't realise I had the camera on mongston white balance, I wasn't paying attention, so I need to edit out that nasty blue colour cast, it might be you have a colour cast for a different reason. How do we edit out a colour cast? Well we're going to bring up image, adjust, colour balance, obviously it's blue so we're gonna bring out the yellow, let's drag a bit of yellow into there and also the opposite of cyan is red, so we're going to shove a bit of red into it as well to get rid of the cyan, and do it to the highlights, I'm doing this really roughly and really quickly, I'm not giving a huge amount of care, I just wanna kind of get you seeing what I'm on about, If I do a preview, look it's gone from that blue to a much more pleasing kind of warmer summery sort of a colour, okay. I'm going to quickly check the levels, image, adjust, levels, just to see. Level is a great way of seeing how the contrast is doing, there's a histogram in there, and I'm quite happy with that I'm not going to change anything, so I'll say okay.

Next thing I want to do is to save it somewhere, I want it nice and safe. Now what I'm gonna do is to save it into my finals folder because that's where all my finally tweaked images would go. I normally lay things on their side but I'm not going to now, so it's save as, go up a level into the finals folder and save it, I'm not going to rename it, I'm just going to leave it as the same file name, the very fact that, that file name is in the finals folder that means it's done and it also means once I've done the
renumbering on the original images being Jpegs or raw files I never change that number ever ever again, even If through the processing I think no I don't like that, I'm going to delete it, I'll just leave a gap in the numbers I never rename after I've done it once because then I know everything is following on if that makes sense. If I make a mess of an image file then I can always go back to the original one, but if I've changed the file name I might get the wrong original.

Okay I can close that now, so I've done the post production I've saved it into the finals folder, lovely jubbly, job done. The last step in this would be suppose I was going to do some work on an image final and make a print, let's open up our little workflow of folders again. So the neg file, the raw file is where I put raw files before I process them into Jpegs or tiffs, Jpegs or tiffs they live in the next file, that's what I consider to be my negatives, because I am a bit old fashioned, I started this with film. Finals folder is where I put finished work, proofs folder is where I put proof images, little ones that I'm going to send to a client to have a look at.

You might even wanna rename that as Facebook images or something cause you've made some a little bit smaller so you can email them or upload them to Facebook. But suppose I want to make a print of a picture you'll notice I have a folder here called processing, this is where I work on things, I work on things in a processing folder because I don't want to risk messing them up. I don't want to mess up and original. So if I want to work on something and I'm gonna send something off to be printed, I'll go into the finals folder where I've done all of my tweaks, and I'm going to copy it, control-c and paste it into the processing folder, control-v.

Why am I doing this when I've done all of my final tweaks? Well the layout that I use I need to do a few little other things to it, to send it to that lab, different labs work in different ways. Paul williams down in Poole who's one of my printers, I can just send him the file straight from the finals folder, but in this case I'm not going to because I want to just resize it and send it to a different lab. Now I've got that into the processing folder and now I can't mess it up, I'm going to pop that into Photoshop, I haven't touched the original. I want a nice by six inch print so I'm gonna use my crop tool here and up here and in the options I've already done it nine inches by six inches at three hundred DPI.

My crop tool and now to make myself and image file that size, and I just do that and there we go it's done. Over here I have the things which I said I have to do to send an image of to my lab, I have to convert it to their custom colour profile and do a couple of other little fiddly thing's. I've made an action here, now the reason I wouldn't want to do this on one of my files is in case I saved it by accident in to the wrong place and I've just stuffed up the on I've done and all of the post production work on. If I stuff it up and it's in the processing folder It doesn't really matter then does it? I can just delete it and go and get the one from the finals folder again.

Let's apply the stuff that I need to send it to pro imagining there we go job done. That's ready for printing and then I go save as, file, save as, and this is the last place in the
workflow puzzle, I've gone back up to the top level, I've come out of my workflow folder and back into the hard drive, you see here I've got one called print order, this is where i have folders already
setup with different sizes ready for me to send an image off to be
printed. So, If I open that up there we go, and I'll save it in there and you may notice that there was a file already in there with that file number, and that's because I stuffed up earlier on, and we had to do this on take two, but I'm not going to go into that again. There we go, I've saved it into there, I can now close that, I can now close Photoshop, actually I'll put it on the other monitor, I use two monitors as you know.

Pop that back over there where it belongs,let's close down Photoshop. This image file which is now in the processing folder, which is the one that I've just worked on, I don't want it any more, I'm gonna delete it. Jpegs don't like being saved very often so I always make sure I close things down and delete them behind me. I go and look into my print order folder down here and go in the six by nine folder here, you'll see there's my image file.

The one of which I'm sending in the email to have a print made, there's two in there because as I say, I stuffed up, but it doesn't really matter because you get the idea, and that will now be sent of to the lab and when I get the print back I can delete that out of there as well provided I remember. So I hope that helps. The workflow for me is I. Give it a number and then inside i have the different
folders for where I'm working.

Raws for raws and then negs for Jpegs, tiffs or psd's and then when I've got what ever work I'm going to do on that, and they're finalized, I put them into the finals
folder. If I'm going to any work on them then I might want to make a composite image or I might want to do something a little bit fiddly. I'll work on that in the processing folder but on a copy, not on an original and then when i send stuff off to be
printed I have print order folder, where I have all the different image size files there ready to send them off to the lab. So there we go, that's how I use workflow, I hope that's helped and I hope you've got your head around it and I hope it will all explain a bit about what workflow is and you can take
away some of this and use it for yourself..