Marc Sabatella August 24th, 2007

The Workflow (continued)

Generate Editable Copies (Optional)

This step is for those of you shooting JPEG and wanting to process your files as well for those shooting RAW but wanting to perform editing operations that cannot be done via RAW Processing and therefore must be saved as JPEG or TIFF (for simplicity, I will henceforth use the term JPEG to refer to anything that is not RAW). And here is where you have some decisions to make.

I think the easiest way to keep yourself organized if you are going to be editing JPEG is to make editable copies (or conversions from RAW) of all your images in a new folder. You can then confine your editing to those copies. This way you don’t have to worry about remembering to do a “Save As” to avoid overwriting your originals. Furthermore, you know your “best” versions of all your images will be together, whether they in fact required editing or not.

The alternative is to either generate copies/conversions of only the files you will be editing. You can either do this before you begin editing, or you can be sure to do a “Save As” any time you wish to make changes to a file. If you choose the latter, you might consider making all your originals read-only (now that the metadata has been exported) so that ACDSee Pro will not let you accidentally overwrite your file.

Whether you generate these editable files for all your images or just the ones you actually intend to edit, you will also want to use categories to help you keep straight which version of your files are which. I suggest having a category called “Versions” with subcategories called “Original” (for the original version), “Master” (for the best edited version you create), and perhaps other subcategories as necessary (for instance, if you make lower resolution proofs to keep on your local drive as described below, or versions sized for the web, or black and white versions). Start by assigning all of your originals to the “Original” category (this can actually be done during high level metadata entry). Any editable copies you generate will get the “Master” category. If you do not in fact generate editable copies for all your images, then you may want to assign the “Master” category to the original copies of the files that do not have editable copies. That way, if you at some point wish to browse the best versions of your files, you can filter on “Master” and it will automatically show you either the edited or original copy of each file as appropriate. Unfortunately, ACDSee Pro does not provide the sort of built-in version control facility that could make this process easier, which is one reason you might find it more convenient to generate editable copies of everything – it is easier to manage the version categories on this basis than on an individual file basis.

As mentioned, I suggest placing the editable copies in a separate folder. You can put this underneath the current folder if you like. In The DAM Book, Peter Krogh suggests appending something to the names of the the files you generate, to help keep straight purpose of each copy. You might add the letter “m” (for “master”) to these copies. This is easily done using ACDSee Pro whether generating the copies for a group of images at once using Tools->Batch Processor or one at a time using “Save As.” Be sure to check the options to preserve database information and embedded metadata.

Before deciding on how you want to work with your editable copies, you might wish to read what I write about proofs below, and decide if working with proofs instead full size editable copies makes more sense for you. Some of you may use full size editable copies but not proofs, some may use proofs but not full size editable copies, and some may choose to use both.

Edit Copies As Necessary (Optional)

Once you have editable copies, or have prepared yourself to only save copies of the originals, you can begin working on any images you wish to edit at this time. You can use presets to some extent to help you apply work done on one file to other files. You will find the process of going through many images to be much more cumbersome than it is for RAW Processing, because the facilities for editing JPEG files are not non-destructive, do not include the handy right click shortcuts for copying settings from image to image, and require you to explicitly save your changes every time you move from image to image. This is why I encourage you to use RAW if possible, if most of the processing you tend to is is the type that can be done via RAW processing (exposure, color, sharpness, and noise reduction primarily, also crop and rotate).

You may decide that the capabilities of the ACDSee Pro editor are not sufficient for what you wish to do. Fortunately, ACDSee Pro makes it easy to invoke external editors via Tools->Open in Editor. Other editors you may wish to consider include ACD’s own Photo Editor, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements., and Paint Shop Pro. Personally, I do not often find the need to do the sorts of things that require external editors, but when I do, I am generally happy with The GIMP, a free utility that works much like Photoshop.

Because editing JPEGs, whether with the built-in editor or an external one, is less convenient than processing RAWs, you will probably find you do not want to do much of it at this stage. Certainly, there is no reason to edit your your images until there is actually a need to do so, such as before actually printing an image or posting it to a web site.

Generate Proofs (Optional)

Once you have all your images looking the way you want, you may wish to generate proofs – lower resolution and/or more highly compressed copies of your images. The advantage of these proofs is that they can be significantly smaller in file size than the originals or editable copies. I do not have room on my notebook hard drive for the original version or an editable copy of every picture I have ever taken, but I do have room for proofs of them. I can elect to keep higher quality proofs of my high rated images and lower quality proofs of my low rated images, and can control the actual quality of the proofs in order to reduce the file size as much as necessary to fit comfortably on my local hard drive.

In fact, because I do most of my image processing via RAW Processing, I generally skip the previous two steps dealing with editable copies of my images. Instead, I generate proofs for all my images, and if I want to do further editing on any of the images (which is pretty rare), I do it to the proofs. The proofs I generate for images rated 3 and higher are of high enough quality to print at 4”x6”, and if I know I will be wanting to make a larger print of a given image, I will simply generate a large enough proof – perhaps full resolution, very little compression – to make this possible. If I decide later to make a large print of an image I had edited only via a lower resolution proof, I can always start over on the original image – which I probably would want to do anyhow, since I probably wasn’t being as careful with my initial edits as I would have had I known I was going to make a large print.

To generate proofs, I use Tools->Batch Processor. I have presets that do no actual processing except to resize the image to various sizes and apply different amounts of JPEG compression. For instance, you might wish to resize the images you have rated 3 or higher to be 1200×1800 (the minimum resolution necessary print at 4×6 at 300dpi, which is the most I would ever expect of a proof) at a JPEG compression / image quality setting of 85. You might wish to resize images you have rated 2 to be 600×900 (just enough to display full screen at acceptable resolution on most monitors) at a JPEG compression / image quality setting of 70, and you might decide that the thumbnails the ACDSee Pro keeps in its database are all you will need to keep on your local drive for images rated 1. You might also create a preset that does a JPEG conversion at full resolution and minimal compression, and use this for images that you know right away you will want to create large prints of.

If you think you will want to keep local proofs, you can experiment for yourself to find the right balance between image quality and file size for your purposes. As a point of comparison, if I have 10,000 images that in DNG format are around 5 MB a piece, that is 50 GB of space – about as much as I have available on my notebook hard drive. But if I reduce them to 1200×1800 at a quality setting of 85, they are over 10 times smaller. Meaning I can fit over 100,000 proofs on my notebook hard drive. Even if I make proofs this size for every image, this will probably last me until I get a new computer with a larger hard drive, but to be even safer I can go with lower resolution proofs or no proofs at all for my low rated images.

I assign all of my proofs to a category called “Proof”. This allows me to filter my future browsing and searching so that I view only the proofs. The proofs can be the version you use for most everyday purposes, such as creating slideshows, posting to the web, or emailing to others. If you decide you want to then access the original as well, you can simply turn off the filter. Depending on how you arrived at the file for which you want to view the original, you may also need to do a Quick Search on the the filename to locate it. Note that since we have already exported the metadata, this information will not be incorporated into IPTC unless we do another export. You can do that now if you wish, but since the proofs will be stored in a separate folder (see below), it would be easy enough to recreate this information later if necessary – for instance, if you copy these proofs to another computer to access.

The proofs I generate all go into a folder called “PROOF” that lives on my local drive. I create subfolders under this that correspond to the names of the buckets for the corresponding originals. The files themselves have the letter “p” appended to their names. Because these proofs are so much smaller than the the originals, the proof folder corresponding to a given full (around 4.4 GB) originals folder will of course be nowhere 4.4 GB in size. Thus, for example, your proof folder DVD_PRF_023 may have only 400 MB of images in it when your originals folder DVD_ORG_023 reaches 4 GB in size. So rather than backup your proof folders to individual DVDs, it probably makes sense to combine them. When you generate a set of proofs, you should check to see if these proofs combined with the other proofs you have generated since the last DVD was create have reached 4 GB in size, and if so, back them all up to DVD.

Move Files To Archive Buckets

You are now done processing the images, and it is time to move them to their permanent home in the bucket system. You can do this by selecting all the files in the folder (including XMP and/or RPP files if present), right clicking, selecting Move to Folder, and then browsing to the current bucket. Depending on how you configure your ACDSee Pro windows, there might be other easy ways of doing this.

You should check first, though, to be sure there is enough room in the target bucket. You can browse to the ORIGINAL folder in ACDSee Pro and then click on the current bucket folder, which should be the last one you have created. After a few moments of calculating, the total size of the folder should display in the Properties pane. You can then return to your working folder, where the total size should be displayed in the status bar, and determine if adding all these files to the bucket would push it over the capacity of a DVD (around 4.4 GB). You should be conservative in this to allow room for database information to be included on the DVD; I generally consider a bucket full the moment it goes over 4GB, and I back it up to DVD and start a new one with the next higher number at that point.

Depending on how big your memory cards and how full they are when you copy them to your computer, you may decide to split your current working folder up between buckets. For example, if you have 3 GB in the current bucket and have 2 GB in your current working folder, you may wish to put 1 GB of working images in the current bucket, back that up to DVD, then start a new bucket and put the remaining 1 GB of working images in that.

If you have created editable copies of your files, you will probably want to archive those as well. I recommend creating a parallel bucket structure under the DERIVATIVE folder for these. You can make the bucket numbers correspond exactly if you like, so that an image in bucket DVD_ORG_007 has its editable copy in DVD_DRV_007 as well, as I recommended for proofs. But whereas for proofs, the resulting folders were guaranteed to be much smaller than the originals folders, this may not be the case for these editable copies - the size differences are not likely to be as extreme. This means that it may not be very space efficient to try to combine folders named this way onto a single DVD. For example, DVD_DRV_006 and DVD_DRV_007 may be 2.6 GB in size each. Backing them up onto separate DVDs would be rather wasteful, but they are too large to combine. So instead of creating a new DERIVATIVE bucket every time you create a new ORIGINAL one, you are probably better off only creating new DERIVATIVE buckets as necessary. This means that an image in DVD_ORG_007 may well have its editable copy in DVD_DRV_002. This should not be a problem, as the ACDSee Pro database will keep track of what files are in what folders. You may want to get in the habit of labeling your DVDs with the date of first and/or last images they contain, in addition to the bucket names themselves.

After you have copied your files to their buckets, this would be a good time to run Database->Back Up Database. I generally keep one backup on my computer and one on a rewritable CD or DVD. I also include database information on the DVDs I create for each bucket. Periodically – such as, perhaps, when starting a new bucket – you should consider running Database->Optimize Database as well.

Export Database (Optional)

There are several reasons you might want to save your database information outside of the internal database. One would be so that the information can be made accessible to another computer running ACDSee Pro. Another would be simply as a form of database backup. Yet another would be to allow you to someday migrate your entire system to another application. To some extent, the fact that we have exported our metadata to IPTC and to RPP files will allow this already, but exporting the database itself is another optional method that you may wish to use.

To export the database, select the images for which you wish to export information and go to Database->Export. In the wizard that comes up, select “Export database information for selected items” for most normal database export operations, or the text file option if you are trying to export the database in preparation for migrating to a new application. You can specify a location for the exported database. If you would like this information to be made available to other computers accessing the images, then the logical place to store the information is in the bucket along with the images. That way any computer that can access the images can access the database information as well. It would also be logical to select all the files in that bucket when exporting the database – not just the newly added ones – and to overwrite any exported database you created in that bucket previously. Thus the exported database in the bucket always reflects the current contents of that bucket. You should be sure to leave enough room in the bucket for this information! However, if your primary reason for exporting the database is for backup, then you may prefer to export the entire database (rather than just the information for the files you are currently working on or even all the files in the current bucket), and you will probably want to keep this exported database someplace more central.

At this point, you are done processing your images. You can now consider them part of your permanent catalog.

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