Digital Darkroom

My ‘darkroom’ is entirely digital with an Apple Apple Power Mac G5 Tower 2.3Ghz Dual Core Processor and 23″ Apple Cinema HD Flat panel display at the hub. I switched to the Mac platform when I first set up my design studio in 2001 and have never looked back. I am currently using OSX Leopard and overall, am very happy with it.

My workflow has taken a little while to evolve and is constantly being refined further but I now download the RAW images from the memory cards or iPod to the Mac, using Adobe Lightroom, for which I have been a beta user since it was first introduced. I choose to copy all images into a folder on a separate hard disk drive using the date and name of that day’s shoot such as ‘2008-06-22 Name’ where the folders are grouped under year. This is so the folders index quite quickly making it easy for searching, archiving, backing-up etc and usually, I know where to find them. Once the images have imported into Lightroom, I then review them and delete any obvious non-keepers, making any colour and contrast corrections to the remaining ones. I only physically convert an image to another format now when needed, so I can catalogue and keyword at this stage knowing I won’t need to repeat the process. I then make web galleries, export images, copy to DVD’s and CD’s as required. TIF files are created whenever a print or high resolution image is needed and then archived. I only convert selected images to TIF when needed - this is a big improvement on how it used to be just a relatively short time ago. Images are then archived to an external 500Gb Firewire hard drive with additional backups burned to DVD. Lightroom now keeps track of where everything is and allows for quick visual access as well as searching by category and/or keywords so I am able to locate images of any subject quickly.

This workflow has taken some time to evolve but it works well for me now but no doubt it will evolve and change further over time as needs change as it has changed over the past 5 years or so. Lightroom has proved to be a godsend as I used to use Cumulus, iView Media Pro, Portfolio, Image Info Toolkit and various others in order to achieve the same results. I have tried various applications for converting from RAW, trying Capture One and others but always went back to Adobe Camera Raw as I seemed to always get the best results with it. I immediately signed up for the beta of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom when it was first announced and was delighted to be invited to join their pre-release programme to still be involved in testing and contributing to the development of the product and am currently beta testing version 2. Thanks Adobe.

I have long been interested in cataloging and Digital Asset Management solutions and have tried several alternatives, never really finding one I have felt truly happy with. Those I have tried include IView Media Pro, Extensis Portfolio, Canto Cumulus, Image Info Toolkit and Photo Mechanic. My favourite was Cumulus, as it was the ony solution offering the facility for nested and relative keywords. The downside however was that it took quite a long time to get set up and I spent hours getting it just right. I am also particularly interested in the use of controlled vocabularies so partly why it takes so long to set up a system is ensuring everything is entered correctly and that keywords are correctly nested and related. For example, if I add a keyword to an image of a duck, I want to be able to enter Mallard and my system automatically add duck, waterfowl etc and to correct my spelling of Mallard to mallard if that is what I have previosuly entered. I was very pleased that Lightroom recognised the system I had so painstakingly set up and other then a little tidying up, I had a complete nested keyword structure intact which I have since been able to improve on further due to Lightroom’s flexibility. I am gradually developing a full scientific taxonomical keyword system which includes scientific or Latin names as well as common names for the various species of plants and wildlife I photograph. This is a mammoth job but it is amazing how much you learn about natural history in the process.

Due to the ability I now have in Lightroom to easily add relevant keywords, descriptions and captions to the RAW file (instead of having to add it to each derivative image) I am rebuilding the galleries on this site and in fact, am looking into a better way of dynamically adding images with more relevant details.

Watch this space

Graphics Tablet

I acquired a Wacom Intuos3 A5 Tablet to replace a Trust 1200. Although the Trust had an A4 working area, I found that the A5 size working area of the Intuos was more than adequate for digital photography and feel the larger size probably more suited to graphic designers and illustrators. The Intuos tablet is superb with the facility to set up buttons on each side of the pad for quick access which means you can sit back in your chair and work with a pen and pad instead of being hunched over a keyboard and mouse. For processing photographs in Photoshop and Lightroom, it is ideal and much more intuitive and is also proving very useful for exploring digital photo art - using one of my photographs as a base image and then painting digitally with natural media effects to produce digital watercolour, pastel, guache or oil paintings. This is proving to be an exciting project but has quite a learning curve and I don’t have a great deal of time for this at the moment unfortunately.

Digital Printing

For printing, I had been using a Canon i9950 desktop printer and had achieved some superb results, both for printing my photographs and also for short run print jobs for our design clients. It was a costly consumer of ink however, as I never used anything but genuine Canon inks. I had had it a couple of years and it had given exceptional service so when the printhead finally gave up I couldn’t really complain. For what it was going to cost in repairs, replacement printhead, new set of inks etc, it gave me an opportunity to consider my longterm printing options. As a small design studio and fine art photographer it did not take long to decide that a large format printer made a sensible longterm investment, especially as it provided a service which could then be offered to clients and other photographers. The new Canon IPF5000 was chosen, based on various reviews and reports I had read.

This printer produces some amazing prints! I am absolutely delighted with the print quality and have experimented with various paper types and also canvas and achieved some excellent results. It has taken some serious experimentation however as there are so many settings and so many combinations that I had to resort to using a notebook to keep track of which ones I have tried and what the results were. Once you get the right match, it is very, very good but the driver software doesn’t make it easy in this respect so quite a few tests were needed initially but I do feel that I am now starting to get my head around it and am starting to achieve some sort of consistent results. Others have been so impressed with the results, especially on fine art papers and canvas, that I am already starting to produce prints for other photographers and artists. I will add more information on printing on fine art papers when time allows.

For everyday printing of documents, postcards and some small proofs I find the Canon Pixma iP4300 Photo Printer a superb desktop A4 printer which produces some excellent colour prints, perfect for 6×4, 7×5 or even A4 when required.

Don’t forget to take a look at Recommended Products where most of the products I use and can recommend, are shown.