May 08, 2008
David Bergman on Workflow
I recently had the chance to see, renowned concert/sports photographer, David Bergman talk about how he uses Aperture to cull unwanted images and enhance and correct the selects from a shoot. Surprisingly, his daily workflow is not much different than what I have come up with, aside from the fact that I don't use Aperture (mostly because of the fact that it will not run on my Powerbook G4) and he has way more photos and selects to deal with. However, when I had a beta copy of Lightroom (which did run on my Powerbook), it is what I found to work quite well.
Anyway, the basic workflow is the following:
- Import your entire shoot and add metadata to all the images. copyright info, short summary perhaps of the shoot. This is useful for quick searches through the library later in life. The copyright information, obviously can just save some legal hassle later.
- Glance at every photo and give it a 1 star rating if it's something that might have potential.
- Filter out your view to only shots that have 1 star. By this time, you've probably cut the number of shots down by at least half, if not more.
- Relook at the 1 star images and give it a 2nd star if and only if it's worth spending more time on. You can use a bit more time to decide this, and for similar shots select only the best of them.
- Filter out your view to only shots that have 2 stars. Now, here is where David's approach is a bit different. He relooks and filters to 3 stars and reserves 4 and 5 stars for exceptionally good photos he wants to use in his portfolio. I on the other hand am not on the same caliber as him and would have next to no shots left if I went to 3 stars, let alone 4 or 5.
- Correct
After you make your initial selects, which should be a small fraction of the images you shot initially, it's time to make some corrections, crop and perform other edits (in Photoshop or wherever). The next part, for me, is bad because it allows for too much experimenting. For David, his formula works great and it's something I might try when I get some more computing power to power the free copy of Aperture Apple gave me for attending David's talk (Thanks Apple!).
David has sort of a set formula for the sliders and tools he touches and hardly ever strays from it, but makes sure to always correct the white balance first. Then he'll adjust the exposure as needed, possibly warm up the temperature a bit (on the photo, his office is air conditioned) and then turn on the visual display of highlights and black points. He'll then decide what's appropriate for the scene and use the recovery tool to get back some highlights and similarly with the black points.
At this point, the initial image should look pretty good and he'll decide whether or not he wants to use the settings from this picture as the settings for others and if so he'll apply them to the others and continue on. He'll then crop and, if necessary, add a slight vignette.
My correction flow is a lot different, and it's the part of his presentation that I took the most away from. It's possible to get great photographs by doing very little extra work. I used to go through all the sliders and experiment, but I now know it's not necessary, so I'll just not touch them.
You'd never think such a simple flow would work, but it seems to, and I saw him perform it right before my very eyes.
March 28, 2008
Adobe Joins the Online Photo Editing Bandwagon
Adobe lovers rejoice! You no longer have to use more powerful software on your personal computer where you store your photos! Now, you can upload your photos to Adobe and edit your files from anywhere using a less powerful Photoshop Express!
It was bound to happen. The online photo editing scene has been taking off and lots of sites now allow you to upload a picture and make some adjustments to it and save it back down again. Adobe has been mysteriously absent until a few days ago when they released PS Express. The great thing about it, is that it works really well and provides you some simple tweaking. It's probably one of the nicest Flash/Flex applications I've ever seen. The photo management portion of it reminds me of Light Room's browser and the editor is probably more like Elements than Photoshop, but that's only because you're not getting tools like the lasso, the pen tool or curves. My guess is that we'll be seeing some more improvements and maybe even some other software packages come to life online from Adobe.
March 25, 2008
Save Polaroid Film!
For some reason I don't remember posting about the announcement by Polaroid to discontinue all of it's instant film in the coming year (take a look at this chart). There are many people shooting and relying on instant film and so naturally, a new campaign to "Save Polaroid" has started. Sign the petitions, even if you don't shoot polaroid, you may discover it in the future (like I was hoping to do).
November 16, 2007
StudioCloud
StudioCloud is a web based photography studio management system which includes scheduling, invoicing, reporting, inventory management, client management, and financial capabilities that are all integrated with in studio and online galleries. The application is written in Adobe's Flash (the demo of StudioCloud is probably the most extensive Flash application I've ever seen), and has been showcased by Adobe. I'm not sure how many Photub readers will find this interesting, or useful, but if nothing else, it's a great example of what can be done with Flash.
September 14, 2007
February 27, 2007
jAlbum
Daniel from jAlbum writes in to tell us about jAlbum, a free piece of software for creating photo albums. Oh, and did I mention it's written in Java, a cross platform language, meaning it'll run on your computer too? Check it out, it looks great.
January 10, 2007
Scrapblog
Today is definitely the day we're talking about putting your photos online. If you're still looking for ways to do this after the article I published earlier today, then maybe Scrapblog can help you. From their site:
"If you love sharing photos like we do, you'll love Scrapblog. With Scrapblog, you can easily create stunning multimedia scrapbooks featuring your photos, videos, audio and a bunch of creative elements. We made Scrapblog drag-and-drop-easy so that everyone can tell their stories and share them online or turn them into high-quality photo books and DVDs. Best of all, it's free and there's nothing to download."
Update: Of course, it'd be helpful if I helped you get to Scrapblog. Link fixed.
January 08, 2007
Plogger for Photo Albums
Plogger is an open source gallery system that runs on top of MySQL and PHP. It looks to be a serious contender for those looking for a photo album online.
December 15, 2006
Linux Photo Organization Shootout
Linux.com has an article about the top GNU/Linux photo organizers. There are quite a few to choose from and after reading some of the comments, a bunch more popped up. If you're a GNU/Linux user and looking for a photo organizer, head over and take a look at some of your options.
I don't know if of these applications run in *BSDs, but my assumption is that some of them do.
December 08, 2006
Tabblo Books Beta
Tabblo, a great way to tell a story in pictures, just launched Tabblo Books. The books are available in 2 sizes 4 x 4" (at $9.99USD) and 9.5 × 8* (starting at $29.99USD).
Like other parts of Tabblo, Tabblo Books brings with it a nice, in browser, dynamic interface. And, of course they have ready made templates.
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