Defining a post-production workflow

As digital photographers, we take far more pictures than most film shooters do. Because shooting digital is so cheap and easy, it's not hard to come back from a shoot with a huge number of images. Do this a few times and you can easily get overwhelmed by a massive glut of imagery. Having a good post-production workflow then is essential both for dealing with images that you've just shot and for staying organized and effective as your image archive grows. Capture NX 2 makes a great hub for your post-production workflow, but you need to be thoughtful about your overall process, and you might need a few additional pieces of software.

Post-production begins when you copy your images from your camera's media card to your computer. Some people call this importing, some people call it capturing, some people call it ingest. The last one is a little too digestive for me, so I'll stick with importing. Anyway, importing is also where you make your first organizational decision: where are you going to put your images, what are they going to be named, and so on. You perform this organization using the file manager of your operating system. On the Mac that's the Finder. In Windows that's Windows Explorer. There's no right or wrong to how you organize your images. Whatever make sense to you is best.

I tend to create folders based on geography and within those I create subfolders based on further geography and dates. So, for example, I have a California folder. Inside that I have a San Francisco folder, and inside that I have folders based on the date that I shot. At other times, I might create folders based on geography and events. For example, my parents live in Oklahoma, so I spend a lot of time there, but I also teach there at an arts institute in the summer and fall. So I keep an Oklahoma folder, which has a lot of different date-based subfolders, as well as subfolders for specific summer and fall workshops.

What matters most in an organizational scheme is that you understand it and that you know how to find something when you need it. I would argue though that it's best not to create subfolders that go too deep. For example, I would not create subfolders within an event for, say, interiors, exteriors, people, landscapes, that sort of thing. If your folder structure gets too granular, then you're going to spend too much time navigating up and down your folder hierarchy to get to the folder that might contain the image that you want to look for. It's much better to keep your images in large groups and sort and sift through those using the metadata filters in your browser software. Capture NX has those.

At import time, some people also do a backup of their images. I suppose whether to do this before or after your editing session is really kind of just depends on how optimistic a person you are. I tend to not back up at import time, but later, after I've worked on my images. After importing, you're ready to start making your selects. This is the process of choosing which of your images you're going to actually edit, adjust, and output. Obviously not all of your images are keeper images, and don't worry, even the best photographers rarely do better than a 5:1 or 10:1 shooting ratio. So, you want to figure out which ones are the ones you like, mark those, and then pass those images through the rest of your workflow.

With your selects made, you're ready to start image editing. This is when you'll open the images in Capture NX and alter and adjust them. Finally, output. This might be printing, or it might be saving the file for upload to a web site or submitting it to a client. Output usually involves resizing, sharpening, and possibly saving in a particular format. If you didn't back up before then you might want to do that now. Or even if you did, you might want to again, since you'll now have a lot of edited files that need to be backed up. Lastly, to manage your archive as it grows, you might want to consider adding your images to a cataloging system of some kind.

This makes it easy to browse thumbnails from your entire image collection, even image files that are stored on offline media. We'll be looking at each of these steps in detail throughout this course.