Digital workflow is everything that takes place after you click the shutter.

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about one of the most important processes in photography today, something that doesn’t involve apertures, shutter speeds or cameras at all –digital workflow. The digital workflow is everything that happens after you click the shutter, and it’s something that most of us end up spending a lot of time on.

Having a good digital workflow affects the quality of your photos. I’m going to guide you through the basic tenets how a professional may go their post-processing, and make a few suggestions for ways to set up an effective and efficient digital workflow of your own at little or no cost.

Pick it up after the jump.

There are three big steps in any photographer’s digital workflow.

Organization

With the capacity and price of flash memory today, photographers are taking a lot more photos. I know in my own experience, it’s not uncommon for me to take upwards of several hundred photographs during the course of just a few assignments. There’s nothing wrong with this - those exposures don’t cost me a dime. But if I don’t have a strong organizational system in place, all those extra photos are going to cost me a lot of time down the road.

This is why the first step in the digital workflow is so important. Nothing’s worse than having tons of photos scattered at random on your computer, never to be seen again. Professionals use software like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to avoid this problem. Packages like Lightroom contain utilities that download your photographs from your digital camera, organize them into photos and rename them automatically to something a little more descriptive than, say, IMG_0195. They also contain editing tools to make common adjustments without having to load up a dedicated graphics-editing package.

Unfortunately, Lightroom retails for nearly $300. A good budget alternative for an amateur digital workflow is Picasa, free photo organization software from Google. While Picasa certainly does not have the fine editing control and filtering features of a package like Lightroom, it does provide a basic way to get all your photos in the same place and view them quickly. It even supports most RAW formats.

Picasa’s user interface.

Picasa includes tools to rate photographs and then filter by rating, allowing you to see only the best photographs in a collection quickly. You can rename photographs quickly and organize them into different albums. The editing features aren’t much, but they may satisfy photographers looking for a quick fix. For a free software package, Picasa is a surprisingly good start to any budget photographer’s digital workflow.

2. Editing

Picasa or Lightroom provides you the means to choose which photographs continue on in your digital workflow to the editing stage. When it comes time to edit, the unquestioned and unparalleled professional choice is Adobe Photoshop. There really is no substitute for Photoshop’s many tools to edit the exposure, color and detail in a digital photo. However, you have to pay for that level of control - a personal license for Photoshop costs $649.

Photoshop’s so useful that’s its difficult to recommend against it, even for photographers on a budget. Still, if you can’t afford Photoshop’s price tag, check out GIMP - a free, open-source alternative. GIMP includes a rich feature set as well, and there are tons of tutorials online for it that show you how to do common editing tasks. All the essential tools for post-processing - curves and levels in particular - are a part of GIMP, making it a strong choice for a cheap digital workflow.

GIMP is an able open-source alternative to replace Photoshop in your digital workflow.

One problem with GIMP is a lack of native support for RAW files. If you shoot in RAW, check out a free RAW editor like Silkypix to replace Photoshop’s Camera RAW in your own digital workflow.

An important thing to mention is that no matter what image editor you are using, be sure to save your files at their maximum quality level. TIFF is preferable because it is a lossless image format, but it takes up a lot of space. If you need to save to JPEG, save with the highest quality settings. This ensures your best photographs won’t lose any quality as a result of editing.

3. Archiving

Nearly every photographer will shoot beyond the capacity of their hard drive sooner or later, especially if they have a lot of photographs saved as TIFF or RAW files. The last step in the digital workflow is finding somewhere to store all those shots.

Both professionals and amateurs can accomplish this fairly cheaply. Backing up to DVDs is a good solution, offering you a lot of storage for a relatively cheap price. A second, portable hard drive can work as well, but it’s a good idea to look at remote storage via the web for some added redundancy. Sites like Flickr have begun to offer unlimited storage
for a yearly fee of $25, but the size of any individual photo is capped at 10mb, a size most uncompressed files exceed. A site like Box.net offers online storage for any purpose, with prices starting at $25 a year for two gigabytes of storage and a 50MB file size limit. Neither of these are perfect solutions, but in combination with backup on DVDs and hard drives, they can provide an added peace of mind that you won’t lose your most valuable shots, no matter what happens.

Every photographer approaches their digital workflow differently, and these are very broad steps I’ve outlined here. If you want a rigid, exhaustive ultra-detailed routine to follow, you can find complete digital workflows down to individual cropping and white balance correction routines at sites like Luminous Landscape. I think that following any one individual’s routine down to the letter is silly - you have to find what works for you. Just remember it doesn’t have to be an expensive process. There are always budget alternatives, even beyond the few I’ve provided in this article. It’s up to you to see what makes sense to use in your own digital workflow - both in terms of time and money.

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