Martins site » dng http://www.dmldata.se www.dmldata.se Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:12:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Raw from now on… http://www.dmldata.se/raw-from-now-on/ http://www.dmldata.se/raw-from-now-on/#comments Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:29:57 +0000 martin http://www.dmldata.se/?p=524 I decided to make a little change in how I store my images from now on. Since I’ve been using using Lightroom 3 for some months now I see how good noise reduction can be applied, which makes me think about some old photos I deleted because I deemed them too noisy. So, from

Read the rest by clicking here...

]]> I decided to make a little change in how I store my images from now on. Since I’ve been using using Lightroom 3 for some months now I see how good noise reduction can be applied, which makes me think about some old photos I deleted because I deemed them too noisy. So, from now on, I keep all my images in Raw format (which is native DNG in my Pentax), the filesizes in my case is somewhere between 13 and 20 MB, it’s not so much when you consider how big harddrives are today. It means something like 70-80 Gb per year at my current rate, so a 1Tb disk (which is about standard today for an external drive) would last me for more than 10 years! And, with raw I can always go back to the original image and fix things that I’ve learned later, as well as use new better software! :-)

…oh, and by the way, I really like my new Tamron 70-200 2.8, it’s really superb, and ever so sharp. That and my 50mm 1.4 is what will always be in my photobag…

Share/Save

]]> http://www.dmldata.se/raw-from-now-on/feed/ 0 My post-photography workflow http://www.dmldata.se/my-post-workflow/ http://www.dmldata.se/my-post-workflow/#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:46:37 +0000 martin http://www.dmldata.se/?p=516 One of the areas of photography which is becoming more and more important now with digital photography is the post processing. This is how I do it;

I copy the photos from my memory card to my hard drive to the place where I keep my photos (I leave the photos on the memory

Read the rest by clicking here...

]]> One of the areas of photography which is becoming more and more important now with digital photography is the post processing. This is how I do it;

  1. I copy the photos from my memory card to my hard drive to the place where I keep my photos (I leave the photos on the memory card until I’ve completed the last step in this workflow)
  2. I view the photos in a simple image viewer (such as irfanView or Picasa Image Viewer) without any adjustments in order to check which ones I want to delete, and delete them right away (I rarely delete photos in the camera, because sometimes you don’t get a good feeling for the quality of the photo until you see it on a big screen).
  3. I rename the folder in the following way; YYYY-MM-DD Description (2010-06-02 Beach with the dogs)
  4. I rename the files inside the folder to the same name as the folder, and add a counter at the end (2010-06-02 Beach with the dogs_0003.DNG)
  5. I start Lightroom (Lightroom 3 Beta can currently be downloaded free from Adobe, try it!)
  6. I chose Import and chose the option to keep the photos where they are and add them to my Lightroom Catalog.
  7. I mark all the photos with a rating from 1 to 5 stars, where I hardly ever use 1, since it would be so bad that I likely would have removed it before ever getting this far (this includes all photos out of focus, too under- or overexposed or accidental double shots of the same scene). 2 is my “ok”, 3 is “good”, 4 is “excellent, would be good for a print too” and 5 is “My very best, my portfolio material”. In an average shot of maybe 150 photos I would probably have about 100 2′s, 30-40 3′s, 5-10 4′s and probably no 5′s (In all of my photos I’ve taken with DSLR’s I have only about 15 5′s, in total).
  8. I go through the photos with these following steps;
    - Adjust exposure (no more than +- 1.0 step in exposure)
    - Adjust colour balance (usually a tiny bit towards yellow/warm)
    - Adjust fill light (I usually always add a little)
    - Add a bit of clarity (about +20 or +30)
    - Add a little vibrancy and saturation (+10 usually)
    - Remove a bit of noise (not all of it though, since it usually removes all texture or detail)
    - Check and possibly add sharpness (depending on the photo, it if needs it)
  9. If the photo needs to be cropped or straightened I create a virtual copy, and do the adjustments on the copy, so I can see both the original photo and the cropped/straightened one
  10. Even though I shoot all my photos in Raw format (which is DNG in my camera) I don’t feel I need to keep all of them in Raw since it takes up much disk space, so I keep the Raw-file of the 4 and 5 star photos, but the rest I convert to jpg in Lightroom in the following way;
    I select the photos with rating up to 3, and chose export. I keep the original size, and don’t add any sharpness. I chose jpg, sRGB, quality 75 (usually means 3-4 MB per photo) and export to the same folder as the original photo.
  11. I then go into an ordinary file management software (I prefer Total Commander) and where I see there are both jpg and Raw for the same file I remove the Raw.
  12. Back in Lightroom, I do a search for missing files. Those that come up I remove (those were the Raw DNG’s I just deleted since I made JPG’s instead)
  13. I do a new import, which gives me the JPG’s which were just made
  14. Now that I have the folder with a mix of Raw-files and JPG’s I set the meta-data. I set keywords containing info about who is in the photo (first name of the persons), if there are animals in the photo (names if I know them, or at least species) and the place/venue where it was taken (both country, city and place). I also add some other keywords if there are special objects in the photo, or if it is especially funny. If it is on a special occasion (birthday, wedding etc.) I include that too, and if was taken abroad I include country and city. I also in include if it is a portrait, landscape and still life.
  15. The last step is uploading all the photos to my Flickr-account (built in lovely feature for this in Lightroom 3), which I use both as an extra backup (I always backup my photos and lightroom catalog in at least 2 (more usually 3) places. I export in full resolution, and since I tagged keywords this information also follows into Flickr.

Share/Save

]]> http://www.dmldata.se/my-post-workflow/feed/ 0