collectivity

One of the challenges with a photography post-processing workflow is not only does it need to be productive for me personally, but it also needs to be an orderly process such that I can pause my work and resume it later. Life’s distractions are many and the ability to leave off and pick up later is crucial for me.

In rough order, I do the following:

1. Shoot the photos (of course).
2. Store them in a hierarchical folder structure that fits my organization scheme.
3. Create a new Adobe Lightroom Library specifically for the photo shoot.
4. Create a collection (usually named Color4×6) within the library and drag all the “keepers” into the collection.
5. Manipulate each keeper for exposure, tone, contrast/brightness, sharpness, etc.
6. Crop for 4×6 (1.5:1 is my camera’s aspect ratio) sized prints.
7. Make collections for each of the print sizes I intend (Color5×7, Color8×10).
8. Select all in Color4×6 and choose Make Virtual Copies — this leaves the newly created virtual copies selected.
9. Drag virtual copies (left selected by last command) to one of the other collections.
10. Delete the virtual copies within the source collection.
11. Select the destination collection and recrop all photos for the new aspect ratio.
12. Repeat 8, 9, 10 for all other print sizes.
13. Make collections for each of the print sizes I intend in B&W (B&W4×6, B&W5×7, B&W8×10).
14. Select all in one of the Color collections and choose Make Virtual Copies.
15. Drag virtual copies (left selected by last command) to the corresponding B&W collection.
16. Delete the virtual copies within the source collection.
17. Select the corresponding B&W collection, select all photos and Convert to Grayscale.
18. Repeat 14, 15, 16, 17 for all of the other print sizes to be output in B&W.
19. Output each of the collections to its own directory on the filesystem. I use TIFF 16bpp color, sRGB 300dpi, no maximum size constraints.
20. In each of the color output directories, I run a script that either converts the image to JPEG at quality 90 and 8 bpp color or up-samples it to the correct resolution for the dpi desired (e.g. 1200×1800 for a 4×6) and converts to JPEG at quality 90 and 8bpp color.
21. In each of the B&W output directories, I run a script that adds random film grain to the image with a hardlight screen operation. Subsequently I perform the same up-scale and/or convert to JPEG performed in step 20.
22. For each of the final JPEG files, I use a script to identify the source NEF image (I shoot all RAW) and call negtags2jpg to migrate the EXIF data into the JPEG, as the ImageMagick command line utilities I use to make my manipulations do not properly migrate the tags from TIFF to JPEG.
23. Create a web gallery for the color images using HtmlGallery against the Color4×6 output.
24. Create a web gallery for the B&W images using HtmlGallery against the B&W4×6 output.

To wrap it all up I upload the final JPEG files to an online printing house and archive the JPEG and web gallery output along with the Adobe Lightroom Library, original NEF files and XMP sidecar files.

When I convert images to B&W, I often add some artificial film grain to the image. When I do this by hand, I usually just grab a section of the grain source randomly and hardlight screen the original image with it. Tonight I needed to batch add grain to a number of B&W images and I didn’t want the grain to look consistent among them. After the jump is a perl script that selects a random source-image-sized selection of a grain source and hardlight screens the source image with it. This is done via imagemagick command line utils.

(more…)