workflow ll

he importance of good workflow has never been as clear to me as now. When on the road you do not only want to spend as little time as possible working in front of the computer but you also have limited amount of energy at hand. This is why the importance of workflow is so big. You want things to go smoothly and with out much effort. Specially as you can not work on the computer at any time you like. It is possible to work in the car during the day but it becomes hard when the sun is shining at that time it is impossible to work out side. You simply cant see things right to do any color corrections or work on the files. Thus it becomes necessity to work on your files at night after dark preferably. But thats the time you want to get to rest and enjoy the moment after a nice day and dinner. Even sit by the campfire with neighbors and chat. To be able to do this you would have to have a software that allowed you to do the most basics of things in the raw conversion before you do the final touch up of images and key-wording. Unfortunately there is no one software that works to the way I would like to work. Surely there are softwares like Lightroom and Aperture that come close but neither of them is any good for me. Aperture just simply doesn't work on my computer. It is to slow. Still my laptop is only two years old and of the better kind, but not good enough. The same goes for Lightroom. Unfortunately it is to slow and cumbersome to work. I just wish that some software vendor would think of Photojournalist and those Photographers that need to work out in the field. What a software vendor would have to have in mind is preferably my way of working. Of course it is to much to ask that some software vendors will listen to me, but who knows. It doesn't hurt to ask. My preferred streamline would be something like this. Take the picture. Upload the pictures to the laptop. Do sorting and throw out those that are not good enough. (remember I have to be cruel because of limited space available) Her comes the much necessary point. META DATA. I would like to be able to put in metadata and keywords at this point and have them stay with the raw file. Then comes the color correction processing. The same goes here I would like that processing to stay with the raw files. If Kodak could do this easily, why could not others? After meta data and the first set of color correction comes backup of the raw images. Here I like to copy the raw images to a external hard disk and also to DVD. This is so I can send the DVD home for some one to take care of while I am on the road. It is easier and better to send dvd more often than to collect it to hard drives and then send one hard drive home. This also means that if something happens you at least have some images from the trip. Now comes the part where you can go and build your campfire while the computer is at work. The conversion of the raw file to TIFF. The tif file is then opened and the dust cleaning and final touch up is made. At this point the image is ready to be sent to who ever is going to get them, stock agency or what. I at this point also convert the tif to JPG full size and upload that to Digital railroad. Thus I have many-folded backups of my images plush people get to see them there. You would also at this point import the image to a database like Portfolio to keep track of the images and add additional keywords that you forgot in the first round. Portfolio can then export those keywords (just as it imports from the file) to the file and IPTC fields In my future work I will be usingAdobe Lightroom, Canons DPP software and Portfolio. Probably some more. Of course all my images then go through Photoshop. Photoshop is the standard darkroom to day and although I started working with Photostyler unbelievably many years ago (my final exam images from school where all done in Photo styler) Photoshop just is the best still to day for the final work. So why not use Photoshop and Adobe bridge then all the way. More of that later.