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.
Continue reading star ratings
I have to admit, I am seriously impressed with the Digital Photography Workflow website dpbestflow.org. An initiative of the American Society of Media Photographers and funded by the American Library of Congress, it is a fantastic resource for all digital photographers worldwide. It is mainly the work of Richard Anderson and [...]
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.
Continue reading Workflow / Workslow?
In a way I suppose it’s partly jealousy. After all, Scott Kelby is the author of many international bestsellers, all of which focus on the art and craft of photography. I could be so lucky. Or clever.
But I do have other, more valid reasons to think less of Scott’s latest book. And it’s this: he has SUCH influence and he’s peddling rubbish. With influence comes responsibility!
 I’m trying to plough through his latest book on Lightroom, the incredibly long-winded “the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book for digital photographers“. Now while I’m no expert on Lightroom, I do know a fair bit about digital asset management, and over the course of the last 4 years or so, my views on the subject have been largely informed by the world’s leading expert on the subject, Peter Krogh. Digital Asset Management is a broad subject that covers the management of images from the time they come off the camera all the way through to their permanent homes in our archives.
Lightroom is of course an application that covers a lot more than digital asset management, but if you use it, it does have a large role in that process, so it’s good to understand the basics behind DAM to get the most out of it.
And it’s here that Kelby’s book falls over for me. It covers all aspects of Lightroom, and I’m quite happy with what I’ve read in the other sections, but the first section, the section on the Library, is what I’m struggling so much with. It is in there, understandably, that all “digital asset management” type functions occur.
Continue reading Why Scott Kelby doesn’t know a DAM thing
 The DAM Book I’ve just finished Peter Krogh’s book on Digital Asset Management, The DAM Book. Recently published in a second edition, it’s not just a slight update on the first edition, which I talked about here. The new DAM Book completely re-looks at Digital Asset Management in light of recent software developments and trends, most notably Lightroom, but also great little apps like ImageIngester Pro.
A lot of what Peter writes about hasn’t changed from his first volume, but in some cases it has, and in others it has just been refined. Mostly though, it has been expanded to look at new workflow options with Lightroom, and seems to cover more ground with the management of working files, and the areas of data validation and the ingestion process.
It’s a much bigger book than the first tome, weighing in at over 460 pages. Now, I’m sure Peter would be the first to admit that this is not lightweight casual reading. It’s technical, and at times, a tad dry, but if you are passionate about your digital photography, and even more to the point, you are someone who wants to learn how best to manage and leverage those assets, then you will plough through this book in the first instance, and then come back and re-read it several times to enable the gradual implementation of all his good advice. For this is no lightweight matter. For someone with 10,000 digital images randomly thrown into folders on their computers, not properly backed up and in proprietary file formats, this is going to be a long, big job. But bringing your archive up to DAM standards will be one of the most valuable things you could ever do to your collection, and this book shows you precisely how, and why, to do it.
The structure of the book is awesome. He starts at the start, with a discussion on why we need Digital Asset Management, what the objectives and benefits are, and then he continues from there. There is a logical flow to the subjects he discusses, and a really good mix of theory, implementation and examples.You can see a list of the Table of Contents for the new book on Peter’s site, here.
Continue reading The DAM Book (2nd Edition)
I have been thinking more about workflow. I am a DAM and a DNG convert, and have been slowly trying to turn these approaches and tools into an efficient system. There are several workflow solutions, and it would appear that one of the most popular is the Bridge / iView Media Pro (now Expression [...]
|
|
recent comments