That’s digital workflow to you.

I did a fair bit of corresponding with people much more experienced with digital photography than I am, which is to say just about every photographer I know, asking how they manage the work flow for an efficient, low risk result.

Not surprisingly, the range of responses was about as broad as the styles of the photographers I spoke with. As with any mechanical process, workers will cast around empirically until something that feels right comes along.

My picture throughput is, I suppose, of two types. There are family pictures sent to me by one and all for eventual publication on the family web site. These arrive in hard copy, as film or slides, on CDs or by email. Generally of low resolution, and not much is needed for web publication, they get dropped into a current quarter album in iPhoto ‘06, are culled and sorted at quarter’s end, then crafted into web pages using the File->Export->Better HTML plug-in for iPhoto, all of it taking less time to do than to explain. After adding titles and dates, upload to the ISP using Transmit takes no time at all. A few seconds more and the menus on the site are updated for the latest quarter. This efficient routine has taken the drudgery out of the process and makes sharing the family site with all and sundry a lot of fun.

The other type of picture I have to process is my own ‘serious’ work. Stated differently, these are the snaps whose primary goal is large, framed, wall hanging prints, anywhere from 8” x 10” up. These fill up the walls at the old manse as well as making nice gifts for friends. The originals are scans from 35mm, medium format or 4” x 5” negatives or, increasingly, RAW or JPG images from the Canon EOS 5D. With all of the medium format gear sold and most of the 35mm equipment now gracing collectors’ cabinets in Japan, that leaves 200 mB large format scans and 4-12 mB JPG or RAW digital files to contend with. As iPhoto is immensely capable, handling even the recent CR2 Canon RAW format with aplomb, these get dumped into thematic directories therein (landscapes, forests, etc.) and, once culled, a double click opens the images in Photoshop CS2 as a native file or, in the case of RAW, in Adobe Camera Raw. Whatever processing is required is performed and the images are then saved to the iMac’s desktop and printed.

These desktop high quality files are then dropped into Extensis Portfolio 7 (now 8, but I have not bothered to upgrade), keywords are added to each, and the whole thing is backed up automatically overnight. Given the amount of time and effort expended through this point, a comprehensive back-up strategy is vital. The cost in light of the risk of loss is negligible. My back-up approach is three pronged. First, duplicates of the good personal pictures appear in iPhoto and Extensis libraries, albeit on the same disk drive. Second, at midnight the iMac’s internal hard disk is incrementally backed-up to an external LaCie Firewire hard drive. This is a bootable back-up with the full OS X Tiger operating system resident on the external drive, allowing me to boot from that drive in the event the internal disc in the iMac fails. The iPhoto and Extensis libraries do not reside on the iMac’s internal drive. Rather, they are stored on a second external LaCie Firewire drive, this a 250 gB monster, which in turn backs up incrementally to a third external 250 gB LaCie.

As backing up is even less exciting than doing your tax return and certainly easier to forget, an application named SuperDuper! takes care of the chore daily and automatically. It’s the first back-up application for the Mac that speaks to you in English rather than Geek and works perfectly. Ever the Doubting Thomas, I check the ‘bootability’ of the external drive monthly and compare the files sizes on the two 250 gB Lacies weekly to see that they remain identical.

Now my iPhoto ‘06/Portfolio 7 strategy may not be suitable for those taking a lot of pictures. but for the 500 or so family snaps and 200 or so personal pictures I reckon on saving annually, it’s fine for me. I confess I was tempted by Apple’s Aperture as a Swiss Army Knife solution for everything, but my research suggests that the application is far from debugged in its first version and needs a top of the line Mac computer to make it run at acceptable speed. As I have no intention of blowing five grand on the latter, Aperture can wait. I still think Photoshop has one of the worst interfaces known to Man (if not Geek), but Adobe Camera Raw for RAW files goes a long way to simplifying things. The folks at Adobe really need to take a look at iPhoto for user interface design.

I tried Adobe’s free beta release of Lightroom (I challenge you to find it on Adobe’s web site) which has a nice look and feel stolen from Aperture. However, it is so slow in loading larger files on my iMac G5 as to be unusable. I would dearly love to drop the duplication resulting from using Portfolio 7, but as Apple has had some complaints about stability in iPhoto (though I have had no issues) I remain committed to the belt and (two sets of) suspenders approach until I can be convinced otherwise.

There seems to be a growing number of external RAW processors and sharpeners out there which plug-in to Photoshop, as if that application needed any more menu items. While I let others do my testing for me, everything I have read (after discounting the fact that 90% of what’s out there is nothing more than a paid endorsement) suggests that the native code in Photoshop CS2 is as good or better than the after-market variants. For me that means RAW conversion, curves, levels and unsharp masking, which is about all I ever use in CS2. Dust removal? A thing of the past with digital images.