The advent of digital photography has spiked the interest of digital image processing. Back in the film days, majority of amateur photographers’ workflow stops as soon as the roll of film is dropped off to the processing lab. Not too many photographers ventured into the art of the darkroom, developing their own negatives, manipulating the print, and adding special toning and effects to their final prints. The darkroom was a mysterious place ventured only by the hard-core photographers during the film era.

Fast-forward to the current digital era, the final images taken with a digital camera are open to image adjustments that’s accessible even to the most basic user as most manufacturers include basic software that allow the user to make changes to their images. While most basic software are capable of performing basic adjustments such as brightening up an image, cropping, and adding more color saturation to images, most of the bundled software do not offer much flexibility and precise tuning.

What is a workflow?

We’re concentrating on the digital darkroom workflow for this article, it is important to understand that there is no single workflow that will work for everyone and you should develop a workflow that will fit your needs and whatever your hardware is capable of.

A professional wedding photographer may have a different workflow than a press photographer, and a parent taking photos of their children will have a differently suited workflow as well. There’s no right or wrong workflow, but this article series will help shed some light on the different aspects that virtually all photographers should take into consideration when creating their own personal workflow. Take the bits and pieces from this article that you feel that suit your needs and leave out those that you think that are overkill.

A workflow is a structured work process that a photographer should follow every time a photograph file is transferred from camera to the computer. Having a structured workflow has several benefits including:

Organizes the photo library

Facilitates easier photo searches

Safekeeping digital files

Consistent image editing sequence

Consistent results for intended output device (for web viewing or print)

If you’re just starting with digital photography, you’re actually are in a better position to develop your own workflow than a photographer who has amassed thousands of images without developing a workflow and attempts to create one later on. A beginner will have a smaller library of files to organize and is less tedious to develop, fine-tune, and customize a workflow.

Requirements

Naturally, you’ll be required to invest on some items in order to develop your own workflow, below is a list of basic hardware and software that you should invest in if you plan to develop a workflow (in no particular order):

Software

• Computer
• Memory card reader
• CD/DVD Burner / Extra external hard disk
• Monitor calibration device

Hardware

• Software for adding metadata and keywords
• Software for image editing

Computer

Obviously, a computer is required in order to view, edit, and sort your images outside the camera. The camera only has a relatively small screen that is not ideal for scrutinizing details accurately. In addition, if you wish to upload your images to the internet, share your images using a CD or with prints, you’ll need your own computer to be able to personally control your results, otherwise, you’ll be leaving all creative inputs to your photo lab to make.

Memory Card Reader

The photos you’ve taken with your camera are stored inside your memory card, and you’ll need a way to transfer those photos into your computer. Virtually all cameras allow you to connect the camera directly to your computer for image transfer, however, this is often a slow process and requires you to carry your camera just for file transfer, in addition, using the camera for file transfer unnecessarily shortens the battery life of your camera.

A dedicated memory card reader allows you to transfer your images from different memory card types directly onto your computer. Using a card reader is fast, convenient, and will not require your computer to have specific software drivers just for file transfer.

Back-up Media

After transferring your images from your memory card to your computer, the images are then stored in your computer’s hard drive. The files are now conveniently accessible to you and should be safely stored inside your computer. However, as any computer owner has probably experienced in the past, computers fail, and hard drives fail at a pretty high rate as it gets old. When the hard drive fails, all your precious photos will be gone and it’ll be quite costly and difficult to have the lost files recovered by a specialist.

Optical Discs

Optical media such as recordable CDs (CD-R) and DVDs (DVD-R) have become really affordable. A DVD-R can typically store up to 4.7 gigabytes (GB) of data. That size is about perfect if you’re using a 2GB or 4GB memory card as you can simply burn one disc per used-up memory card.

Optical discs are portable, affordable, and relatively reliable. It’s often best to make two copies of optical backups and store each backup off-site, such as your office, if your main files are at home. This is to prevent your files to be damaged simultaneously if one location had a fire, flood, or other accident.

Naturally, you’ll need to invest in a CD/DVD burner for your computer in order to have the files transferred onto your optical media of choice. Virtually all laptop and computers are equipped with a burner, so chances are, you won’t need to purchase an additional hardware.

If you don’t have a lot of files to transfer constantly, you can simply bring your memory card to a photo lab and have them transfer the files onto an optical media for a nominal fee.

External Hard Disk

Like optical media, external hard disk prices have been dropping at a rapid rate. In addition, external hard disk capacity have been increasing rapidly as well. External drives allow us to store the drives off-site just like optical media. Most external drives come in 2.5” (laptop hard disks) and 3.5”(desktop hard disk) sizes, both are small enough and portable enough to keep safely in small compartments such as safety-deposit boxes.

The important point to remember is redundancy. It is inevitable that hard disks fail with age and optical media may get scratched, having multiple backup copies ensure that you’ll have at least one set of files safely tucked somewhere.

Monitor Calibration Device

Virtually all monitors sold are not calibrated, even if the manufacturer calibrated the monitor at the factory, your specific lighting condition in your work environment will be dramatically different from the factory preset and your monitor will require custom calibration.

You need to calibrate your monitor in order to ensure your blacks are blacks, and whites are whites. In addition, color variation can wreck havoc on skin tones and other important areas of a photograph that require accurate color representation.

The problem with humans is we already have a pre-conceived mental picture of what certain colors should look like and fail to differentiate subtle shifts in color shade unless a comparative shade is present in the photo. A monitor calibration device is your first step to getting your colors accurately as you’ve seen it in real life. Without an accurate display, any image editing will be pointless as you’re editing without a baseline gauge of what the colors should really look like.

Software for Cataloging

As you take more photos, you’ll eventually reach the point where you’ll need to find a photo that you’ve taken a long time ago to print, sell, or share. When you only have a few hundred photos in your collection, finding the photo you need will not be too difficult, however, once you’ve collected hundreds of thousands of photos, it’ll be next to impossible to find the photo you need without spending hours scrolling through individual photographs and folder.

Using a cataloging software allows you to add keywords, metadata, and arrange your photos in a way where it can be searched easily by using key phrases. Just think of how your local library sorts and arranges their book library with index cards and using a computer database.

A cataloging software is basically a simple database software that adds tiny bits of text info to your photographs to facilitate easier searching.

For example, if you added “San Francisco Trip” to a set of five photographs, even if you have a million photographs in your library, typing “San Francisco” in your cataloging software will pull those five photographs in a jiffy.

I can’t emphasize it enough, but start cataloging your photographs in detail at an early stage, the less photographs you have right now, the easier it is to maintain and update your photo library.

Lastly, choose your keywords carefully and wisely, it will be pointless if you tag all your son’s photo as “son” if you don’t add specific keywords such as “birthday”or “graduation”.

Software for Editing

There are many photo editing software available, but professionals and serious enthusiasts often use products from Apple and Adobe mainly. The software that comes with your camera, especially with more advanced camera models, are often flexible enough for most editing purposes, however, it is recommended to invest in an industry-standard software as it is easier to find support, tutorials, and classes if ever you want to improve your skills down the road. Popular image editing software include products from Adobe such as Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, and Photoshop. Apple Aperture is widely used by Mac users, while Corel Paint Shop Pro is an excellent and affordable alternative to Adobe Photoshop as well.

In our next article, we’ll begin our journey to create a digital photography workflow, starting from transferring our images from our memory card to our computer.

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