I came home with 145 gb of data. I'm five days into processing the files, and I'm getting a little tired of it. This is not the fun part. It's why they pay me. The shooting I do for free.
Here is what happens when I start having to work for my supper. It starts with organizing the files from the get go, with the first card dump. I've found no more efficient ingest program than Photo Mechanic. What is a wonderful feature with the Mac version is that it automatically dismounts the cards after the dump. During the download I start my edit in full screen mode, ticking off the images destined for the trash. Some people believe you should never throw away an image. I am not of that camp. When I shot film I threw away my slides during my initial edit. This is no different. There are bad exposures and out of focus errors and fourth rate pictures that will never have a life. I don't want them, and I surely don't want my client to ever see them.
I then open up the dated folder in Bridge, which on a Mac opens up amazingly fast. The first thing I do is sort by capture date (I shoot with two bodies), then rename with a date code--YYYYMMDD--an underline and a sequence number. Then I apply a copyright metadata template and enter a caption for the batch in the Description field.
Before I clear my cards I have copied the day's folder onto two external hard drives, so that it is in three places. If I'm feeling especially paranoid (and obsessive paranoia is a good thing in a back up protocol), I'll burn an assignment onto DVDs and ship them home.
Now the processing part. The way to think of attacking a large mountain of data is to go from general to specific. There are corrections that apply to all images, to some images, and to individual images, and that is the sequence in which I make my corrections. I use ACR in Bridge for all my processing, and I have a set of processing templates. There is a Default template that has settings all images will have for all the adjustment tabs, and these include: exposure setting at -0.55, Black Point at 8, Clarity at 5, CT at 5400 and +4, and in the lens correction, Defringe at Highlight Edges and a Lens Vignetting at +25.
I have two different Camera Calibration settings for my two 5D bodies (they really do see differently) that I apply to each set (Bridge has a Filter setting for camera serial number). The Fors protocol is a great way to calibrate your bodies. If a lot of my shooting has been in indoor environments, I have another template that changes the color temp settings back to As Shot, but leaves everything else alone.
I apply these settings in Bridge by highlighting the selected images, right clicking and going to Develop Settings, which will list the templates you have made in Adobe Raw Converter. I have not needed to export anything to ACR yet.
Then I attack the images in smaller batches. I select images shot in the same lighting environment and load those in batches into ACR. It might be 5 images, it might be 300. These I correct in smaller and smaller groups, using the Synchronize button repeatedly. I correct one, select everything I shot at the same time, and apply (a tip--hold down the Option key and you bypass the menu selection.) I scroll down the images, and make individual corrections as needed so that the batch looks alike.
Something I am still trying to train myself to do, while shooting, is to stop bracketing. In digital, it is far more efficient to make the same mistake again and again, then to make a series of different mistakes and hope to nail it right once. In RAW there's a pretty wide latitude of forgivable errors. With slide film there's not, and it's rather deeply embedded in my brain that if I'm looking through a camera it's got slide film in it. I can't help myself sometimes, and I make more work for myself when I get home.
I can do about two to three thousand images a day, and still see straight. I take breaks. And I book a massage when I'm done with the job.
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