My Photo Processing Workflow
11 21 2009I get asked every so often what my photo processing workflow is like, so I decided to post it here:
- I always shoot RAW. (Why? Disk space is cheap; ruining a great shot because of white balance issues is annoying.)
- When I arrive home with a new batch of photos, I copy them all to two places: my NAS (to back up my unedited photos) and my photo editing workstation (into a to-be-edited folder).
- My wife Caroline reviews the photos on the photo editing workstation using Canon’s Digital Photo Pro (DPP), marking the ones she does and doesn’t like.
- I review Caroline’s selections and occasionally make a few changes to the selections. In addition to some differences in taste, I will occasionally toss out photos because I don’t think they are salvageable. I also add in photos similar to some of the already-selected photos because I plan on cropping or editing them differently. I will also sometimes switch out a photo for a very similar looking one for technical reasons — slightly better focus or exposure, or less noise. Having said all that, about 95% of the photos I post are the ones Caroline selected.
- I delete the rejected photos from my photo editing workstation. (Note that I still have all the unmodified photos on my NAS.)
- I edit the selected photos in DPP, and then export them as top-quality JPEGs.
- If needed, I edit the photos some more in Photoshop. (This is pretty rare.)
- Caroline reviews the edited photos and provides feedback. If needed I work with her to retouch the photos she has concerns about. Usually a few more photos get deleted at this point.
- I upload the photos to SmugMug.
- I move the edited RAW and JPG files to an edited folder on my NAS. The NAS now has every photo I took straight off my camera, an edited RAW file for photos I’ve posted, and all the JPGs that I’ve posted.
- The NAS is backed up regularly to two separate external drives, one of which is stored off-site.
(And before anyone says, “You should try Lightroom!”, I’ve tried Lightroom, and prefer DPP’s RAW processing.)
Aperture!
Sure glad you added the last line or I would’ve recommended you use Lightroom.
Do you backup off-site anywhere? I’ve taken to using EC2, after all the super-cheap online storage solutions totally failed on me (or change their ToS randomly, etc). Cost a few hundred bucks to commit the initial archive but incremental updates aren’t much.
(I don’t use S3 because it’s not a real filesystem and is too big of a pain to synchronise (or requires tools I don’t trust). Instead, I use a temporary EC2 node to do the rsync to an EBS volume, and keep one snap of that on S3 — that snapshot process is built-in. Only real problem with this solution is that EBS volumes max out at 1TB.)
For disaster recovery, I store one of the two external drives with my NAS backup offsite.
I’ve looked at online backup options several times, but the sheer volume of data makes that difficult. I have almost 1TB of (just) photos today, and have been adding 50-150 GB of photos a month. Also, the growth rate is increasing, both due to increasing megapixel counts as I upgrade cameras, and because I’m doing more shoots.
Yeah about the same here (my photo archive is about 800gb at the moment). I figure you can write off the increasing pixel count, as if you use SLRs and stay in the same market niche, the camera file size growth rate underperforms the hard disk growth rate (and therefore 1/$permb rate). But yes the other half of the math is harder to exclude. I pay Amazon about 100$/mo including a 24×7 small EC2 instance so this hasn’t been a problem yet.
I also factor in that a spinning drive with RAID/clustering is worth more to me than a powered-off drive in a closet. Bearings freeze up, the cloud doesn’t