Electronic Photo Workflow -- Circa 2009

An Anonymous reader was interested in my setup / workflow for processing photos. This post focuses on how the bits flow through the system. I'll write a followup post on how photos are processed as they go through workflow.


This image of the electronic workflow is also available as a PDF Download.

Phase 1) The studio. The first step of the workflow involves shooting in the studio. When I shoot in studio, it is mostly tethered. I've written a couple of earlier post on the details of setting this up: How to install and shoot tethered with Canon and Mac and Shooting tethered with Lightroom. Briefly, any shot goes to the compact flash card on the camera and into the Mac where I view it in Lightroom. For lot's of different reasons, this workflow on the Mac ends here -- it's only around for shooting support and backup in case something happens to the CF card. I don't even dump the Mac version of the photos to the network and wind up trashing them after awhile. The Mac is a circa summer 2007 iMac.

Phase 2) Main computer. So if I shoot either in studio or outdoors, I wind up with a bunch of CF cards. I use SneakerNet (put on my sneakers and walk to the computer) and load these images up into Lightroom. After editing in Lightroom, Photoshop, and possibly HDR tools (all to be discussed in future post), I have sets of images on local computer for distribution. This machine is an older Dell 9150, I upgraded to Vista (after a 4GB upgrade) and I do have a dual monitor setup, one of them being a 23" Apple Cinema Display. I use ColorEyes Display Pro and the XRite DTP94B puck to keep all my monitors on all machines calibrated. See the related post on monitor calibration to see why I chose these tools for calibration.

Phase 3) Backup. 2 ways this is done. First, I export a catalog of what I worked on during that session and then burn these off to DVD. These go into a safe. The other backup method is an automatic backup process that runs daily that copies all new / changed stuff to a local Network Storage device (a Dlink DNS-323 with 2TB of memory configured for a 1TB RAID). So pretty much when everything runs, I've 4 copies of the photo scattered around different places and drives.