Hi everybody! This is a topic about workflow, I suppose.
After you've opened a photo in your editor (I use CS6) and you've completed your processing, how do you save your final images? What I mean is:
1. What format do you save in? jpeg, PSD, or tiff?
2. Is there a better format for web vs. going back in to re-edit vs. printing, etc?
3. Do you save to a certain location on your drive? Other organizing tips?
4. Do you ever save as a smart object? What the heck is that all about?
5. Any other advice on delivering or posting a high-quality image just as it appears in my editor?
I don't expect you to teach me everything here, but if you tell me you like jpegs, I'll investigate that further on my own. I feel like save settings and organization are the biggest mysteries in my photography at this moment.
I have a folder in my hard-drive that I call 365 - and I transfer my pictures into that folder once I have them uploaded. That folder is my screen saver so all my photos cycle through all day - bringing back precious memories while I work at my desk.
Of course, I do back up my hard-drive regularly. (which reminds me - I must do that!)
I save my photos as a high-resolution jpeg. It takes up more memory, but you have a higher quality picture.
I organize them by subject. I have a folders for the various sports my boys play, Boy Scouts, various trips we have been on, photo-a-day (where I put all my fun shots I take specifically for 365, such as challenges), family pictures,.... makes it easier to go back and find them later.
About twice a year, I make DVD copies. I used to be able to get a whole year of photos on one disk, now it takes many because the files are bigger. I got a CD storage box and store them in there. Make sure you label with date and what is on it (kids photos, family photos, football, baseball, Maine, NH Winter,....)
I use Dropbox so that my 365 is safely stored in the Cloud but only in JPEG fairly low res which is what I use for uploading to the site. My Lightroom is backed up daily to a hard drive through Time Machine on Mac.
I take my photos in RAW and import them in a "Copy as .DNG" file by DATE inside my "My Pictures" folder. I do this all through Lightroom, so Lightroom coordinates the import insuring that the files go to my harddrive (or anywhere else I direct them in case I have made a different folder for a specific purpose). LR then makes a "smart preview" for me so I can work inside LR on the editing. If I find I don't like what I import, I dump it immediately from the hard drive (but from LR). Once I'm done editing, I then export it back to the hard drive and save it as a .jpeg. Sometimes high quality (for print or for something that requires high res) and sometimes in low res (for 365, etc. where we don't want to send large files and take up the space Ross has provided for sharing photos!).
If I'm doing a bunch of photos that I know I won't be editing much, I skip using RAW and the photos directly import as .jpegs. Then I edit. After editing, I export the final version back into the folder and delete the unedited image if I like or not. I try not to save anything in too big of a file as using RAW aleady takes up space. Hope this helps.
@hollymays I shoot I in RAW and import the files into Aperture on my MacBook Pro. I let Aperture store the files in its own library file and after editing I export them as JPG into a single folder from which I upload to Facebook/Flickr/365Project. I also have a large capacity external hard drive which I have Time Machine backing up onto. My iTunes library is on another external drive which have included in the Time Machine backup, since my Aperture library is now taking up 1/3rd of the internal drive I'm going to get another external drive, move the library onto that and have it also included in the Time Machine backup.
Thank you all so much for the great info. I do shoot in raw and upload to Lightroom, I guess I should've mentioned, and I've been saving as jpeg to a desktop folder. We also have a hard drive that LR backs up to regularly. I was worried I wasn't doing things the "right" way, but it seems everyone does pretty much the same thing. One thing I didn't consider was saving at lower quality for 365. I'll be more aware of that from now on! I love this community so much!
@homeschoolmom Be careful with that solution yo - DVDs don't last forever, and the layers in them will start to come apart over the years. I'd trust multiple magnetic (meaning hard drives) copies over optical, for anything long term.
@hollymays Shooting RAW and smashing them in to LR and exporting a shiny JPG is about as good as one can do! You shouldn't make further edits on the exported JPG though as subsequent saves will lower quality further still, always work from the RAWs for best effect. Also there's no point saving at a lower quality* for 365 as the site'll downsample anyway, and the diskspace taken up by a single JPG exported from a RAW will be fractional anyway so you won't be saving any space your side either :)
*But one should save at a lower physical dimension - the longest edge 365 will allow is 1024 pixels I believe, so I always export with that as my longest edge, and at the highest quality.
@hollymays Since you are using LR I'll share my flow as well ...
I usually shoot RAW. I have a parent folder called "Masters" and import to that in the default folders by year and date. I also have a parent folder for "Exports" within LR which is where I send my finished JPEGs. I have folders including stuff for Facebook, jobs for friends/clients, 365 - high-res or low depending what it is for. I don't export everything as JPEG, only what I need to. After reading a bit of RAW vs JPEG debate, I can see the value in converting EVERYTHING to JPEG (eventually) if future software does not read my current RAW files (being far less universal than JPEG) ... but that's a job for way down the track I think.
2013 and prior are organised into folders by subject, but I am using a different approach for this year, using LR's keywording functions. So I'm leaving everything in folders by date but can look up pictures of a particular person or the beach or long exposures etc etc very quickly with a search function. I'm hoping this works out :) The great thing about LR is all the organising capabilities ... I use the catalogues for a few things as well, and star ratings etc. There are some great tutorials online.
@hollymays
Keeping copies is never a bad idea. :-)
I usually work in GraphicConverter (Mac), but when I work in Photoshop I always keep the PSD and a JPEG/JPG copy. I only use TIFF when I have to. I've tried working with RAW files, but must admit it gave me nothing much...
I store all my photos in year, month, day flies. I drag/drop my RAW into new file then import into Lightroom. Go through delete and edit my chosen images, export into a 'processed' file in corresponding date. Then images are opened in Photoshop, any edits done, copy of original JPEG image saved (I always keep the original JPEG) then resize to 960 on longest size, add sharpening for web and save as filenamefb.jpg. So in the end I have, the RAW file, Lightroom edited JPEG, Photoshop edited JPEG and fb/365 jpeg.
As my HD fills I move everything over to a external hard drive.
I love the extra editing control of RAW and could never go back to JPEG....we all make mistakes and I love I can easily fix exposure or white balance issues easily :)
I do the same as Lisa @homeschoolmom except don't make DVD albums. I do a digital album once a year with the 365 shots. Others I post on FB, Pinterest.
@aliha Ok so, as far as reliable, widespread image formats suitable for photographs go there are basically two.
You already know JPEG (standing for "Joint Picture Experts Group") - it's lossy, but probably the most widely used format in the world, so pretty safe. Lossy means that whenever a raw map of colours (all an image is, at heart - a list of x,y co-ordinates and what colour that co-ord is) is saved in to that format, some of the original information is irretrievably lost. So when you view, or open for editing, that JPG again, it won't be identical to the source file. Quality settings determine how close it is. At a high enough quality, for the vast majority of uses, you could re-save the same image a significant number of times before you noticed visible issues from the lossy compression; it's still lossy though so for mission critical purposes, not the best. But, the upside of being lossy is that filesizes tend to be smaller, which can be a huge benefit.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is lossless - whenever you save out a map of colour values, the PNG file will contain the exact same information, so opening and re-saving will not degrade anything. The downside is, the files tend to be a lot larger, so you won't often find PNG used for photographs of real world things where a bit of lossy compression usually isn't visible and can make huge filesize savings. But for more precise things, PNG will always be perfect. PNG as a format has seen much more widespread use with the demise of internet explorer 6 (which didn't handle it properly and held back its adoption for years), as it also supports transparency so is the de-facto graphics format for saving website resources in. e.g. the 365project logo top left of this page is a PNG using a transparency so the same image file can be used on top of any background and still look nice. So it's also a safe bet that PNG reabability in graphics packages will be around for a long time to come.
I'm for the most part organized with my photos. I have them all sorted by year, since I got serious about photography in 2010. And in each year their sorted by month. I use Ribbet.com for most my editing so I'll upload what I want to edit to that site. Then I save them either my 365 Folder or to my Edited Photos folder. It's all jpeg format. And all of it is on my external hard drive.
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Of course, I do back up my hard-drive regularly. (which reminds me - I must do that!)
I organize them by subject. I have a folders for the various sports my boys play, Boy Scouts, various trips we have been on, photo-a-day (where I put all my fun shots I take specifically for 365, such as challenges), family pictures,.... makes it easier to go back and find them later.
About twice a year, I make DVD copies. I used to be able to get a whole year of photos on one disk, now it takes many because the files are bigger. I got a CD storage box and store them in there. Make sure you label with date and what is on it (kids photos, family photos, football, baseball, Maine, NH Winter,....)
If I'm doing a bunch of photos that I know I won't be editing much, I skip using RAW and the photos directly import as .jpegs. Then I edit. After editing, I export the final version back into the folder and delete the unedited image if I like or not. I try not to save anything in too big of a file as using RAW aleady takes up space. Hope this helps.
Thank you all so much for the great info. I do shoot in raw and upload to Lightroom, I guess I should've mentioned, and I've been saving as jpeg to a desktop folder. We also have a hard drive that LR backs up to regularly. I was worried I wasn't doing things the "right" way, but it seems everyone does pretty much the same thing. One thing I didn't consider was saving at lower quality for 365. I'll be more aware of that from now on! I love this community so much!
@hollymays Shooting RAW and smashing them in to LR and exporting a shiny JPG is about as good as one can do! You shouldn't make further edits on the exported JPG though as subsequent saves will lower quality further still, always work from the RAWs for best effect. Also there's no point saving at a lower quality* for 365 as the site'll downsample anyway, and the diskspace taken up by a single JPG exported from a RAW will be fractional anyway so you won't be saving any space your side either :)
*But one should save at a lower physical dimension - the longest edge 365 will allow is 1024 pixels I believe, so I always export with that as my longest edge, and at the highest quality.
I usually shoot RAW. I have a parent folder called "Masters" and import to that in the default folders by year and date. I also have a parent folder for "Exports" within LR which is where I send my finished JPEGs. I have folders including stuff for Facebook, jobs for friends/clients, 365 - high-res or low depending what it is for. I don't export everything as JPEG, only what I need to. After reading a bit of RAW vs JPEG debate, I can see the value in converting EVERYTHING to JPEG (eventually) if future software does not read my current RAW files (being far less universal than JPEG) ... but that's a job for way down the track I think.
2013 and prior are organised into folders by subject, but I am using a different approach for this year, using LR's keywording functions. So I'm leaving everything in folders by date but can look up pictures of a particular person or the beach or long exposures etc etc very quickly with a search function. I'm hoping this works out :) The great thing about LR is all the organising capabilities ... I use the catalogues for a few things as well, and star ratings etc. There are some great tutorials online.
Keeping copies is never a bad idea. :-)
I usually work in GraphicConverter (Mac), but when I work in Photoshop I always keep the PSD and a JPEG/JPG copy. I only use TIFF when I have to. I've tried working with RAW files, but must admit it gave me nothing much...
As my HD fills I move everything over to a external hard drive.
I love the extra editing control of RAW and could never go back to JPEG....we all make mistakes and I love I can easily fix exposure or white balance issues easily :)
You already know JPEG (standing for "Joint Picture Experts Group") - it's lossy, but probably the most widely used format in the world, so pretty safe. Lossy means that whenever a raw map of colours (all an image is, at heart - a list of x,y co-ordinates and what colour that co-ord is) is saved in to that format, some of the original information is irretrievably lost. So when you view, or open for editing, that JPG again, it won't be identical to the source file. Quality settings determine how close it is. At a high enough quality, for the vast majority of uses, you could re-save the same image a significant number of times before you noticed visible issues from the lossy compression; it's still lossy though so for mission critical purposes, not the best. But, the upside of being lossy is that filesizes tend to be smaller, which can be a huge benefit.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is lossless - whenever you save out a map of colour values, the PNG file will contain the exact same information, so opening and re-saving will not degrade anything. The downside is, the files tend to be a lot larger, so you won't often find PNG used for photographs of real world things where a bit of lossy compression usually isn't visible and can make huge filesize savings. But for more precise things, PNG will always be perfect. PNG as a format has seen much more widespread use with the demise of internet explorer 6 (which didn't handle it properly and held back its adoption for years), as it also supports transparency so is the de-facto graphics format for saving website resources in. e.g. the 365project logo top left of this page is a PNG using a transparency so the same image file can be used on top of any background and still look nice. So it's also a safe bet that PNG reabability in graphics packages will be around for a long time to come.