My Work Flow explained/ Expression Media and photoshop cs 4

A couple of people have asked me -both in email and personally- about my workflow. It is a good question. A bad workflow can sink your business, a good workflow makes your life easier. So here is a down and dirty explanation of mine.

I do all the archiving and editing on Expression Media (about $200 here ). It is a microsoft product I know, but it works well with canon raw files. Most of the raw conversions are done with Photoshop (student addition $200 here ) or DPP.

1 Using Expression, I rename everything. It is important to my filing system that I have a naming scheme where each file has a UNIQUE name. A common one is some part of your name (first 3 letters of your last name + first 2 letters of your first name) plus the date(100207) plus a sequential number for the day.

alvst10020700001, alvst10020700002, alvst10020700003...  

2 Write captions/keywords/people to the raw files, then write the files to 3 different OWC hard drives.

I do steps 1 and 2 in the field, with my laptop.

3 Back in the office I'll dump everything on to a raid 5 array and import the raw images into a master Expressions catalog. I then make sure that captions/keywords are correct in the raw files. Note that Expression seems to have a catalog limit of 128,000 images so I have a different catalog for each year.

4 Edit with Expression using the raw files.

5 Convert edited raws into full sized 16 bit tif master files. I use either photoshop of canon dpp. There are a bunch of converters around. Use what you are comfortable with. I do not rename the files, just the extension. They go from alvst10020200001.crw to alvst10020200001.tif The correct captions should travel with the files automatically as they are converted.

6 Import the tifs into another Expression (Master Tif) catalog that has only tif files in it.

7 from the Master Tif catalog I can write files for the client. Expressions lets you automatically resize images to other locations. I'll also generate a catalog of jpg files that are more reasonably sized for quick viewing. 

In this system all the images raw, tif and jpg have the same file name but different extensions. It makes it very easy to return to the original raw file. Also doing the captions in the raw file keeps captioning consistent across the images. The idea is to do the work once and save time down the road.

Backing up as opposed to archiving is a different matter altogether. Its a different talk for a different day.

-Stephen Alvarez

Comments

[Stephen Alvarez]

@ Julian The editing, pulling out the good images can take a long time. A long story like Stone Forest will have 25 or 30 thousand images. Getting that down to the 12 or so that we publish is a long process. Then converting the raw images to tiff can take quite a bit of work as well. That's why I make a full sized tif for permanent file then convert it down to what ever size I need. It keeps me from having to do the conversion more than once.

I don't convert things to dng, just keep the original raw (in canon's case crw) files around.

[Julián Urbina]

Thanks for the explanation! it'll be very useful for some of us. A couple of questions:
How much time do you invest on editing? is it just basic stuff? and what about DNG (Digital Negative)? does that belongs to archiving? or do you even use it?