Photo editing

[terpsichoros]

I've just recently changed how I process photos. Here's the process up through about the end of November:

1. Download photos from camera to computer
2. Do color correction, sharpening, and cropping on all but the worst of the pictures (using CaptureOne v4 - I need to upgrade.)
3. Email 800px copies of the pictures to people in them whose email addresses I have (using Picasa)
4. Look through all the processed photos and pick out the ones I like best. Name them after the people in them (or the characters they're portraying, or some outstanding feature of the picture), using IrfanView.
5. Create scaled jpeg copies, usually 1/3 of original size, for web display, and thumbnail copies (200px high) for gallery view, using Irfan View.
6. Create a new directory in my website for the photos, and add an index entry for the cgi script to use.
7. Upload photos to my website, using PuTTY

This has its obvious disadvantages, but it has the big advantage that all but one of the programs are free (as in beer), and that one costs a fraction of what Photoshop does. (And if a photo needs actual photoshopping, I have GIMP for that.) The new workflow, and I'm still tweaking it, looks very similar, with one big exception:

So-so photos get discarded during the color-correction process, not later.

I'm not one of those photographers who will take 700 pictures at a 4-hour event, even if I'm not actively participating. The most I've usually taken in such circumstances was about 120. But even that's a lot, and with more participation in Dickens Fair, and getting a job in the middle of it, I suddenly had lots of pictures to catch up on, and less time to do it. So doing the culling earlier had to happen. There will still be a second-round culling, where I've been doing it, but hopefully fewer photos will be killed there.