Photographic workflow

The workflow that I use for the photographs on my website has remained pretty much unchanged for many years.

  1. Copy the photos from the card to the computer and then delete them from the card.
  2. Open the folder of photos in ACDSee and delete any obvious duds.
  3. Open all the photos in Paint Shop Pro 4 (yes, I know it's ancient but it works well, I know my way around all the tools and it's fast).
  4. I look for similar photos and close the ones that are redundant or unattractive, eventually whittling it down to the set of photos that will form a nice album page.
  5. I rotate (sometimes by arbitrary angles) and crop. Sometimes I'll adjust brightness and/or contrast to save a poor photo if there's something in particular that I want to have a picture of. Sometimes I'll use a more sophistical program like Photoshop to remove redeye or do other colour manipulations.
  6. Very occasionally I will use the clone tool to erase something that I don't want in the photo.
  7. I'll resample the photos to the appropriate size and save them as jpgs.
  8. Finally I'll manipulate the directory listing in a text editor to create the html file, add captions and upload the lot.

Someday I'll trade in my trusty Olympus C3000Z and get a nice digital SLR. But I might wait a few years because the high dynamic range revolution is coming. More about that tomorrow.

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