Who was the dimwit who said that digital was a timesaver? It has taken me as long to process my images as it did to take them, travel time included. Preparing a major shoot for initial review (never mind preparing files for pre-press) is a major headache.
The first ordeal was cleaning up my computer system to accept 20 gigabytes of image data. I filled a hard drive before I even finished dumping the images, had to back up old image files on an external hard drive (as well as make archival DVD’s as a backup), until I cleared out about a quarter of the drive. Photoshop still ran slow as molasses until I defragmented the drive.
I finally appreciate the editing functions of Photo Mechanic. I’ll stop downloading demos and buy the thing now. It loads RAW images instantly, and you can see previews at 100%, which makes dumping the not-quite-sharp ones a breeze. There’s a bunch of other functions in the program that duplicate, somewhat, those of Photoshop, and since I know how to do them in Photoshop I’ll keep those tasks there.
I have over 2000 images to consider. A few hours of editing eliminated about a third of those. Then I made batch corrections of similar images for exposure and color balance. Here is where film and digital thinking diverge. In my mind, the way to cover your butt during a shoot is to bracket. I usually go a stop over and under, in half stop increments if I’m shooting transparency. With digital I might exceed that range, trying multiple exposures for highlights and shadows. Well, in terms of batch conversion, that is a disasterous strategy. There is enough latitude in RAW format to forgive moderate mistakes in exposure. If there are 40 images with the same error, a batch exposure alteration is a snap. If the 40 have bracketed exposures throughout the bunch, it’s a total headache.
I don’t know enough of the nuts and bolts of RAW processing to know if what I have to say here is accurate, but here’s my take. Overexposure (to a point) is more forgiveable than under-exposure. Bumping up a dark image tends to make a contrasty image with not much detail in the shadows, if any. Darkening down a light image results in a lower contrast image with plenty of tonal information for subsequent adjustment with curves layers, or whatever. So long as the overexposure hasn’t resulted in important highlight areas with values of 255 (blown-out), all is potentially forgiven.
Then I had to organize the remaining 1400 images in some semblence of subject groupings, and batch rename them. I have an automated action cranking away right now that is converting the RAW files to the JPGs that the client wants for layout. It will take a couple of hours for that to conclude.At that point I’ll rank my favorites and put them in a separate folder (Photo Mechanic is far smarter for ranking than Photoshop). Then I’ll burn a disk and FedEx it off.
It all, it’s far more post production work than I would have had with film. I will need to charge my clients more for my work (after first disabusing them of the notion that digital saves time).
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