Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos [...]]]>

Star ratings are one of the two most powerful tools we have in our digital workflow (the other being keywords)!

Suck that sentence up for a few seconds. Do you know why?

Basically, it’s because with keywords and star ratings, a database (catalog software, Lightroom library module etc) can sort our photos in a matter of seconds in the most powerful manner possible. With a couple of clicks we could sort 20,000 photos and filter them down to our absolute ‘best of’ folio collection or find those priceless photos of our dog eating our shoes. Without keywords and ratings, we have 20,000 photos to look through…

So they are very powerful. But HOW they are applied is equally important, and it is this subject I want to expound upon, after seeing some very famous and influential photographers (Scott Kelby and more recently David DuChemin) totally stuff it up. The influence these guys have is expansive, and not something I can compete with obviously, but I have to do my bit to remedy the situation…. More after the jump.

Star ratings are now a defacto standard. They are ubiquitous. Bridge, Lightroom, Aperture, Expression Media, IDimager, iView you name it. Star ratings are part of the XMP metadata core. Even Windows supports them natively. So support is not an issue. Unlike Lightroom’s Flags for examples, the usage of which Scott Kelby suggests is a better idea! Huh? Sure Scott. Let’s all spend countless hours ranking our photographs, and then lock ourselves into one single software solution for all time instead of using an already existing and much superior solution that is cross platform and application…

But even more important than support, star ratings are the only type of file based metadata that deals with how good an image is. That means that star ratings alone can help you sort your massive collection of images and filter them down to your very best, your best, or even your worst. All with a few clicks. But it all depends on HOW you apply star ratings. If you whack a 5 star rating on all your best images, as Kelby suggests (and even David DuChemin had done as I could see on his recent CreativeLive seminar), then you’ve just gone and thrown the power of star ratings out the window.

Why? There are actually several reasons. One is that you have no room for growth as a photographer. And hey, we all grow, no matter our age or professional status. So the first rule of thumb is to give yourself room to grow. Personally, I think most photographers can suffice with using just 1,2, and 3 stars for their collection. If you are really, really good, maybe you could use 4 stars for your absolute best of collection – you know, like your 50 signature shots. Basically everyone can leave the 5 star rating for when they have 10 years more growth and a 100,000 more images to sort through. Because this brings me to the second important way to use star ratings. The real power of a rating system is when it is a ratings pyramid, with the best images at the top being relatively scarce in relation to the total number of images in the catalogue. Again, if you have 20,000 images and 10,000 of them are rated as your best shots, it’s not going to help you much. If instead you have 200 images out of that 20,000 rated as your 3 or 4 star images, then there is a powerful and realistic representation of the best of your collection. So keeping the right proportions is important, and will keep your ratings pyramid in the right shape. Otherwise you might end up with a ratings light bulb, much less useful…

In his last book on Lightroom, Scott Kelby’s less than stellar advice was to rate all your good photos as 5 stars and delete the rest… I have to say I nearly fell over when I read that (luckily I was sitting down at the time). Then he went on to suggest that you shouldn’t even use ratings and that Flags in Lightroom was a better idea… Sheesh.. I imagine Peter Krogh would be frothing at the mouth at this.

So there you go. As part of your workflow, you should review your shoots and apply star ratings across the entire shoot. If you are using CR2 or NEF or other proprietary RAW file format, the information will sit in the xmp sidecar file. If you are using DNG as your RAW format, the star ratings will be written directly into the file. A possible rating system could look like this: 0 stars for shots you don’t want to delete, but are nothing special. Up to 50% of your personal work might get no star. 1 star would be a decent shot. 2 would be an excellent shot, and 3 stars would be reserved for your absolute best. A more thorough explanation and breakdown of this system can be found in Peter Krogh’s The Dam Book, or on the dpbestflow website.

Let’s face it – digital photography is a whole new world when it comes to workflow. Analogue was a simple affair in some ways. Of course, the bar was also a lot higher in some areas. You actually had to get it right “in camera” a skill that many photographers today seem [...]]]>

Let’s face it – digital photography is a whole new world when it comes to workflow. Analogue was a simple affair in some ways. Of course, the bar was also a lot higher in some areas. You actually had to get it right “in camera” a skill that many photographers today seem either not capable of, or perhaps maybe more accurately, they are simply beguiled by the instant nature of digital and the power of Photoshop and just don’t see the need to nail it in camera.

I understand the lure. Adobe spends millions of dollars on marketing to persuade us to upgrade every other year (either on one of its workflow methods – Photoshop / Bridge / Camera Raw or its Parametric Image Editing cousin, Lightroom). Their widespread adoption and success is subconsciously giving us the message that the image is no longer good enough without it. And it’s true in a way. Digital images do need some editing to look their best.

But looking at photography from a professional workflow point of view, the old school ways are very attractive. Back then, you did the work in camera, and off it went to the lab. Maybe it was pushed or pulled, but apart from some basic tonal corrections, that was the file that went to the client. These days, a file has to be pushed, pulled and twisted in a dozen directions before it sees the light of day. We deal with conversions to dng files, ratings, rankings, metadata , basic processing in Camera Raw and then touch ups in Photoshop before outputting. Alternatively we do the whole thing in Lightroom or Aperture or whatever.

But there are two approaches. One is to just shoot like crazy and work the files to within an inch of their life in Photoshop or Lightroom and hope we can make a donkey look like a stallion. Alternatively, and much smarter for the long term in my book, is to focus on our technical skills and our shooting techniques and try to get as close as possible to the desired final image in camera, so that our workflow is exactly that, and not a workslow.

I suppose being surrounded by students learning photography highlights these issues for me. But it’s not just students. Even shooters who have been doing this for a long time have to tussle with these issues. Hell, I am dealing with them as I write. I look at various workflow methods, and am becoming less and less interested spending hours in Photoshop, dealing with masks and layers and blending modes. Instead I just want to come in, do a levels adjustment and maybe a bit of a clean up and sharpen on the way out.

I accept that not everyone wants to work this way. Some photographers rely on the magic of Photoshop. My friend Jacqui Whiley for instance is a magician in PS and her images couldn’t exist without it. And all power to her. Her vision is amazing and she is realizing it through the power of pixel pushing. But I am heading down another road, looking for a shooting style that will minimize my workflow and enable me to get busy on other stuff besides Photoshop.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I have been playing with my new iPhone all weekend, and digging around on the net for useful apps and the like. During my travels I came across this very useful little slide show app, not necessarily for the iPhone, but it’s getting to the point where automated galleries [...]]]>

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I have been playing with my new iPhone all weekend, and digging around on the net for useful apps and the like. During my travels I came across this very useful little slide show app, not necessarily for the iPhone, but it’s getting to the point where automated galleries for web sites and blogs are the only way to go. I’m sure if I researched this area some more, I’d find a wealth of this sort of app out there. Sure beats building a gallery by yourself.

Digital Asset Management is going mainstream. And most people don’t even realise it. With the development of Lightroom to version 3 (currently in beta) and the recent release of Aperture 3, sophisticated stand-alone DAM tools are reaching photographers everywhere. They may not be perfect at all aspects of DAM, or suitable for [...]]]>

Digital Asset Management is going mainstream. And most people don’t even realise it. With the development of Lightroom to version 3 (currently in beta) and the recent release of Aperture 3, sophisticated stand-alone DAM tools are reaching photographers everywhere. They may not be perfect at all aspects of DAM, or suitable for every scenario (multiple users in a studio setting or those that need multiple catalogues etc), but for the single user they are a very good one stop shop option.

They are both catalog applications and parametric image editors. In other words, they process the images and keep a catalog over the entire collection. And now that Aperture 3 allows you to export your image settings back into the DNG file,  it’s a cross platform and OS solution (who really wants to be locked into both OS and application forever – come on, that’s just not cricket!)

Microsoft seems to have been left floundering in the dust with its poorly-developed catalog software Expression Media. Once upon a time the predecessor to Expression Media, iView Media Pro was the professional’s choice of DAM software, along with Bridge and Camera Raw. Now, many have replaced all three with Lightroom, and Mac users have the extra option of Aperture.

Users who wish to stay with the triumvirate of Bridge/Camera Raw and Photoshop still have an incredibly powerful and excellent set of tools for image management, parametric image editing and and powerful bitmap editing, but using just these three apps, the cataloging side is missing. There’s not too many good stand alone catalog apps aside from the powerful yet flawed Expression Media, and besides, with the maturation of software like Lightroom and Aperture, there is less and less need for the non-integrated approach. True, a stand-alone catalog application will be more powerful than any of its integrated cousins, but a combined approach will suit many photographers right down to the ground. In many situations, even Photoshop is going out the door. Increasingly it is becoming possible for certain types of photographers to manage their entire work flow, from file ingestion through processing to output like prints & web galleries just in Lightroom alone.

The other bonus is that it spreads Digital Asset management principles out there (despite Kelby’s less than stellar attempts at educating the public about DAM {see my earlier post}) and enriches the DAM side of  a photographers work flow, even if many of them don’t realise that yet.

I’m still on the sidelines, preferring my Bridge / Camera Raw approach for the moment, as there is something difficult to define, that I don’t like about Lightroom. I’m still trying to figure out what it is though. It feels like it’s hiding things from me. Maybe I just don’t know it well enough yet… Is it really time to migrate to a single app solution? It’s sure looking like that time is coming. Microsoft paid a lot of money for the leading DAM app at the time, yet it seems like Adobe and Apple are leading the way with integrated solutions. Whether they are fully robust from a DAM perspective is not entirely clear to me as yet, but I can see we are getting very, very close.

This is getting interesting.

My other blog, my photoblog, runs on Pixelpost v 1.7. I’ve been using Pixelpost for nearly two years now, but have only recently upgraded to the newest version. As far as photoblogging applications go, I think it’s the best one out there (certainly the best one I’ve found.) It’s free, there are a lot [...]]]>

My other blog, my photoblog, runs on Pixelpost v 1.7. I’ve been using Pixelpost for nearly two years now, but have only recently upgraded to the newest version. As far as photoblogging applications go, I think it’s the best one out there (certainly the best one I’ve found.) It’s free, there are a lot of templates to change the design, and there’s a great community of users.

But that’s not to say I don’t have issues with it. I do. I simply don’t understand why it has to be so difficult. The answer to that may simply be ‘because it’s free’, and if so, then fine. But maybe that’s not the entire answer…

I have been dabbling in web design for a few years now, and while I’m not a born coder (never will be) I can write html and have a decent understanding of css. I’ve even managed to design and make several really nice looking standards compliant web sites. But Pixelpost is not a simple website – it’s complex. It’s a mixture of html, css and php, running on a MySQL database. I imagine most people can get it up and running, and even change templates, but modifying it is not for non technically minded people.

And that’s where a few interesting questions pop up. Who is this application designed for? Photographers is the obvious assumption I make. And I don’t make a distinction between amatuer and professional, as a photographer is a photographer. But it would almost appear, looking at the application from a technical perspective, that it has been made for ‘code heads’ instead of photographers. Even my most generous interpretation is that it has been made on one level for photographers (the basic out of the box experience) and has a whole lot of extra functionality possible to those that can get really techy with code. And that’s why I think it’s frustrating.

I want a photoblog that doesn’t require I have a PHD in php, javascript and CSS, but I also want one that’s easily customisable. Maybe I just want too much. That’s the most likely truth. Especially as it’s free. But I wish that the code head developers would realise that most photographers are not necessarily good at coding, and that an application that was easier to customise would attarct a better level of photographer, and increase the market share. In my browsing, I have certainly found a large number of fabulous looking sites with pretty ordinary photos, and also a whole lot of sites that needed some design and attention, but that had great photos. It’s not until you put both together, like J.R Photoblog that you really get a fabulous product.

I know that I’m mostly jealous. It blows me away what some people can manage to master. That’s why I want Pixelpost to make it easier for us lesser talented mortals to compete.

Vista has not had good press since its release. And I can see why. Despite the eye candy Aero interface, it’s what’s under the bonnet that counts, and a lot of reviews certainly point to deficiencies in Vista when compared to its immediate predecessor, XP. I ran XP Professional from the start and at [...]]]>

Vista has not had good press since its release. And I can see why. Despite the eye candy Aero interface, it’s what’s under the bonnet that counts, and a lot of reviews certainly point to deficiencies in Vista when compared to its immediate predecessor, XP. I ran XP Professional from the start and at least from SP2, it was a really good, stable OS. Maybe it’s worth remembering that. XP had loads of blue screens of death before the first service pack, that’s for sure, and it wasn’t until SP2 that it became a really stable, first class OS.

Anyway, I think Vista has lots of improvements in lots of areas, but I also have my pet hates. The almost non stop UAC requests drive me crazy, and I was annoyed at first that some of my older programs wouldn’t run correctly on it. But worst of all was my experience with the Security Centre, and it’s really that I wanted to talk about.

My installation of Vista broke on the second day I had it after it froze up trying to install a monitor driver. After I rebooted, my Security Centre was broken. I couldn’t turn Defender on, Vista didn’t recognise my anti-virus program, and I couldn’t set restore points at all. Some of the Windows updates wouldn’t install, and it was, all in all, a right pain in the ass. My well thought out strategy (well, I thought it was well thought out) of having my OS disk in a Raid array failed miserably as I realised I now simply had a broken OS on two disks. Microsoft of course were no help at all. Their poorly trained support staff had no interest in getting their hands dirty meddling about in the guts of the OS, and would have me attempt an in place repair of the whole OS, an effort which took 2 hours and achieved absolutely nothing (except a whole lot of anxiety for me).

Then I read that SP1 was coming out, and I knew it wouldn’t work for me as long as the Security issues were as they were. I decided I had to either fix the issue or completely re-install the OS, and all my apps. (Groan…) So I decided to try and fix it. I searched and searched on the net and finally found a thread on a forum with the precise symptoms I had, and I thought I was home and hosed. Unfortunately the fix, repairing the repository, didn’t work for me as it had for all the lucky people in that thread. Why I could not fathom.

But if I have a quality with computers it is patience. I posted my issue on a couple of Windows Tech forums, but no one seemed willing or able to help me. Finally I found TechNet, Microsoft’s enormous technical forum, and eventually found a forum that dealt with Vista Security issues. I posted a description of my problems and waited.

It wasn’t a straight forward process. It took weeks of back and forth, trying different things and isolating problems. It didn’t look like it was going to work. But I persisted, and finally today, it all got sorted!!! For those that are interested, the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) was well and truly stuffed along with the repository. I’m not techie enough to really understand all we did to repair it, but if you want to look at the thread it’s here.

All I know is now I face the prospect of installing SP1. Another chance for everything to go horribly wrong I suppose. Don’t you just love Windows!!!

Updated to say I’ve been looking at the 24″ iMac and it’s looking pretty damn sexy right now….

Of course there are many more options [...]]]> I was going to write a small post on a new free Flash based tool from Airtight Interactive called PostcardViewer. But once I got started I thought it’d be better to expand it to review a range of Flash based tools designed for exhibiting photography on the Internet.

Of course there are many more options than just Flash based ones. There’s nothing wrong with a good old html gallery, or a html one jazzed up a little by some JavaScript. The trouble with these however, is that there are not very many good gallery production tools for making html galleries. Many might disagree, and sure Photoshop can whip up a gallery in no time, but they are not the most attractive and customising them is not easy for the amateur.

I’m not a fan of the overuse of Flash that we saw through the nineties. It was a case of technology for technology’s sake, and designers went completely overboard. But the pendulum has swung back somewhat in the last few years, and I think photo galleries are examples of a good, restrained use of Flash in web design today. So, looking at Flash tools, here are a few of the more popular and most common.

A very popular tool, and a great place to start is PostcardViewer’s older brother SimpleViewer. It’s popular for a number of reasons. First up, it’s free! Secondly, there are a wide range of ways to use it, both for generating your own content and putting it up on a website, or looking at others’ content with it (Flickr for example allows sets to be viewed with Simpleviewer..) For absolute technophobes, it’s still going to a bit of a struggle to get it happening, but then again absolute technophobes would probably not be within a kilometer of the Internet. For anyone with just a little courage and the ability to follow instructions however, it’s a piece of cake. For an advanced internet user, it’s almost too easy and hard core coders will not even bother because they want the challenge of something at least as difficult as Pixelpost (which is actually not that difficult, especially for a coder!) And the punters have voted. Simpleviewer is almost ubiquitous on the internet. There are a lot of people using it, because it is simple enough that anyone that can follow instructions can get it to work with a minimum of fuss.

PostcardViewer is another simple idea from the same developer. Check out the demo. I love the idea, and for certain projects, it’d be perfect. On an technical level though, it didn’t impress me because of the end quality of the images. As you can see in the picture below, they have a jagged edge through them at full size. It may not bother a lot of people but people keen about their photography probably won’t like it.

(note the jagged lines around the signs)

Flash presentations seem to have a weakness there. I don’t know Flash well enough as to guess why, but many Flash presentations suffer from image distortion of some sort. It’s likely to do with resizing images and the way Flash handles that resizing. Not all Flash presentations suffer from that issue, but some certainly do and it’s an annoying detail.

Another high ranking option in Google is Imagevue. I don’t know how many people use it, but I have seen the site before, and its ranking would give it a lot of visitors. It all looks very well made, but its over the top techie look doesn’t appeal to me at all, and it costs $54US for a license. Maybe for some, but not me.

Looking on google for flash based image gallery, I realise this task is hopeless. There are squillions of flash based image gallery generators, from the simple to the hopelessly complicated. The trouble is there are SO many good options these days. And the really good thing is that usablity is improving. I don’t know about you, but I think a lot of php based blogging options are simply too complicated for the vast majority of punters to get interested in. Only a very small percentage of users want to struggle with configuring anything in any sort of scripting environment. Even html is beyond the vast majority. To get good reach amongst the millions of amateur and professional bloggers / photographers, you need software that is EASY TO USE.

Or you need to pay for it. Foliolink is an example of a service where you get a whole website, which is essentially one big Flash based gallery. Lonna Tucker’s web site is a simply exquisite example of what you can get. But then again, it’s more her brilliant photography that is so dazzling, but the gallery is pretty cool as well. But the service is pricey – several hundred dollars a year. For a professional, this is of course peanuts, and it’d no doubt be tax deductable, and it looks like a great option if you are not interested in “rolling you own”.

For the slideshows on my parent website, I ended up having a go at a product a friend supplied. It’s called Slideshow Pro. It costs $25 for the basic version and $25 for an interface which is a bit dodgy really, because if you use the basic package, it’s all hand coding. It’s based on Ajax, and it makes cool slide show type galleries, but it’s got a lot of room for improvement. Still, I like the look of this one.

It’s an area where there is so much happening right now. I am the type not to want a purchased package and like to get my hands dirty. So in one way I’m very happy with a blog like pixelpost, which in itself is a very useful photo gallery. But if you want Flash based, and you have the cash, I haven’t seen anything better than Foliolink myself.

Beware, it’s a jungle out there…

Technorati Tags: Flash, gallery software, SimpleViewer, Foliolink, PostcardViewer, Slideshow Pro, photographic web galleries