Exercise 1 - Budge

Initially I set my workflow out on a piece of paper - a list of tasks rather than an actual flowchart. I'm not sure that I 'departed' from my workflow, rather more created one that was so flexible there was no need to depart from it. This is a bog-standard workflow, with standard action check-lists for each stage. Until now I have done very little in RAW and the principal learning was what should be done in RAW verses what should be done in Photoshop. This division of labour works for me, but it may evolve over time.





Digital Photo Workflow

  One of the items, not included in the flowchart, that I find quite useful is contact sheets. On the flowchart I'd insert it between the last two process boxes.




Contact sheet for Exercise 1

 Finally having reviewed the photographs taken for this exercise I settled on these two: -


Budge in profile



Touch your nose


Moving on to this type of workflow poses some interesting questions regarding the photographs removed during the filtering process - should they be stored or deleted? My camera is set up to take RAW and fine - what should I do with the JPEG files, do I actually need them? Should they go in the bin once I've transferred everything to the PC? Or should they be backup copies?

Another key learning - don't delete your new XMP files! The XMP files contain the modifications you make to NEF files allowing the NEF files themselves to remain unchanged. Plus the XMP files only weigh about 8kb, so take up no space at all.