The most common question I get is: “What is your workflow like?”
Thats a good question and I want to answer it in a series of Blog entries. This entry is a basic overview of what I do and the tools I use. The other entries will break the workflow into smaller pieces and go into greater detail on each aspect.
My workflow goes as follows.
- Pick out the gear for the job.
- Shoot !
- Upload photos to my laptop and small external drive.
- Sort and tag images.
- Back up Raw images to DVD.
- Copy the “keepers” in RAW format to the work Drobo.
- Sort and edit the “keepers” to final images.
- Create Slideshow or Web gallery for client
- Burn disc of final images for client and copy for archive.
Laptop
My work laptop is a 15″ Macbook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 4GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM. This is not the newest Apple Macbook Pro but is still plenty fast and I really like the 15″ for its size and power. It fits easily into my travel bag and has enough screen real estate for running Lightroom, Aperture and Photoshop with ease. The downside of the laptop is the limited size harddrive and this model came with a 160GB drive which is just not big enough to keep images on it for very long.
External portable drive
I have gone through a variety of portable drives, and the ones I am using now are the 320 GB LaCie Rugged Hard Disk. These disk drives have a 3 year warranty and with the FireWire 400, 800 and USB 2.0 I never have to worry about how to attach it to my laptop. For more information click HERE.
Card Reader
My current card readers are the Lexar Professional UDMA FireWire 800 readers. I love these things and even though they are a little bigger than a lot of the card readers on the market, they are fast and they never seem to have any problems.
Image importing software
I use Adobe Photoshop Bridge to import the images from the card reader to the laptop and the external drive. I will write in detail about my settings in bridge.
Editing and sorting
I use the new Adobe photoshop Lightroom 2 for editing and sorting my images.
Storage
The new Drobo system stores all my work files and I love it so much that I bought two of them. More on the Drobo soon.
Final Editing
I use Adobe Photoshop for the final edits and Lightroom 2 for the web galleries and slideshows. I used to use photoshop for all the printing, but have slowly started to switch to Lightroom.
Thats it for today.
Next up will be picking out the right gear for the job.
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