Monday 18 February 2013

How I adapted and used my workflow to produce the final couple of images

My workflow changed quite dramatically in one key area after the first photo session: namely storage. I changed the workflow so I immediately transferred images from each session onto a portable hard drive as it soon became apparent the unprocessed raw files (plus the jpeg files) were taking up a lot of space.
 

   I tagged the images as I went along; so for each photo session I would have a 'tagging session' as planned to first and foremost get an idea in my head which were the stronger photos and secondly, to make the work more 'bitesize'.
 

   I found I made a lot of notes about the street photography itself, in regards to techniques (they were a bit rusty!) and also creative ideas I had for the street photography.

   Instead of deleting the less obvious photographs that had technical errors by reviewing on the LCD screen then and there like I would have done in the past, I stuck adamantly to my devised workflow so leaving the editing until I got to the computer. This was to make sure I didn't delete any 'good' images and so I could get an idea of how the tagging in 'Photoshop Organiser' worked and how useful it was. I'm not sure I would take the same, quite so zealous approach in future projects though, as I found the space on my hard drive was being 'devoured' quickly!
 

   I found there were many different ways to tag, caption and rate images inside of the organiser, which was helpful because it enabled me to create the selects, first selects and seconds, while still being able to sort and find them later. For instance, in the past I would have left the unprocessed images on my hard drive, never to be looked at or used again.
 

   I used tagging for the initial selects; an example screenshot can be seen in Figure 1:, where 
I had sorted through the images produced each day with the tags 'High Quality', 'Medium Quality' and 'Low Quality'. The tags obviously provided me with an idea of the quality of each image, with 'High Quality' images becoming my selects.

Figure 1.
   Incidentally, I also used the tag 'crop' (helpfully, I felt) to remind myself later on which photos, be they high quality or medium quality (if I later changed my mind), were necessary to crop in order to improve the image or change the feel of the image. This worked well because I could sort the images by only 'High Quality' and 'crop' images or 'High Quality' and 'Medium Quality' images as well as 'crop' images.



I then used an additional tag, conveniently named: 'First Select' to whittle down the selects to the first selects later on as can be seen in the screenshot in Figure 2:
 

Figure 2.
   Then I came back as was suggested, after some time, to look at my first selects and also the seconds to look at with a 'refreshed' eye as to whether I made the right choice. These 'Final Selects' I then tagged with the correspondingly named tag.
 

   My processing skills could be seen as quite limited (something I hope would change along the way) but I processed the final select images anyway to the best of my abilities and then consequently posted them on this blog, while further selecting the two final images.