I’ve just bought myself a copy of Capture One LE which is a quality piece of photo processing workflow software as recommended by the likes of Paul Indigo and Keith Henson (a couple of professional photographers). Given that it’s designed for professionals it’s no surprise that it’s made my life easier processing the many photos I’ve been taking on shoots. I can spend a lot less time trawling through photos tweaking and prodding them one-by-one and can instead batch process, apply contrast, saturation and a whole host of things all at once. It stops me being so ad-hoc and makes me follow a workflow which is a good thing. Plus the quality of the processed images is a step up from Photoshop’s RAW editor.
Capture One really is very good (hence why I bought a copy rather than downloading a dodgy key generator) and it’s encouraged me to go through some of the older shots I’ve taken but haven’t done anything with. Like this one:
If I go out on a shoot I can take anywhere from 5 to 50 decent photos. It’s not surprising that when I get home I don’t have time to go process all of them – I’ve just been cherry picking the best (in my opinion) and working on them. Sometimes I clearly miss some nuggets like the one above so it’s not been the best strategy! However the time it’ll take to process them all is dramatically less now thanks to my purchase so in future I’ll be able to make the most of a shoot and share more of my work on my Flickr site and here. Nice.
What are you using to catalogue and organise your photographs? Although I would never claim to be a good photographer, I used Adobe Photoshop Album in the pre-Flickr days.
Okay, say I’d been out taking photos at Castlehill this evening. I’d create a folder in my photo folder called:
2006_06_14 (Castlehill)
I then open that up in Capture One and delete what sucks straight away. When I’ve processed a RAW picture (or pictures) it gets stored as a JPG in a ‘Develops’ folder inside the one I just created. I can then open it in Photoshop if there’s anything else that needs doing, like cloning out blemishes, adding a frame and what not. Capture One does have some sort of tagging support but I’ve not looked at it yet!
It’s a simple way to store things but so far it seems to work – I can quickly find what I’m looking for and the photo browser in Capture One lets me quickly search thumbnails (and in fact you can see them in Explorer if you install Microsoft’s RAW image viewer).
I’ll be writing a proper article on what I do (including screenshots) as part of my upcoming Photography Class series!
I shall look forward to the Photography Masterclass! One more question for now: are you archiving the originals on Flickr as well as the processed versions?
Nah, I keep the original RAW files that are quite large and Flickr won’t know what to do with them! I generally just put my favourites and some other random shots on Flickr. I have an external portable hard drive that the photos live on and I periodically burn them onto DVDs. Given that each RAW is 6-9MB in size, that’s a lot of storage required – but I hold onto them in case I ever need to do an A1 print!
I’ve worked out that you need to shoot in the same white balance mode to ensure you always get batch process to work. if you’re in AWB then the balance varies but your batch process doesn’t, so you can get some strange looking skin tones!
Yeah, you’re right, remind me next time we’re out to switch it off auto!