Since starting to take photography more seriously I have developed a quite basic workflow as described in the previous post. As mentioned this was formed of mainly trial and error with a crude method of organising and editing and processing, consisting of copying and pasting selected files into folders. Just by flicking through the course I could see how my work flow was quite flawed, even at the picture-taking stage (I have used raw or jpeg solely at time but never both together). Therefore constructing a new, more efficient workflow was very desirable and intriguing for me.
So my new, make-shift workflow - as I was sure it would improve as I progressed in DPP was the following for the first exercise:
1. Scout out a suitable location and ask a person for a portrait session.
2. Discuss/decide on a few basic poses which the model is comfortable with - for example head and shoulders and a full-length pose.
3. Make sure batteries are charged and there is adequate space free on memory card(s) as I would be taking quite a few photos.
4. Change the picture quality setting of the camera to raw + jpeg before the shoot.
5. Shoot the portrait as described in the course and to the best of my ability so as to make the editing and processing easier and quicker.
6. I had a few notions of how I wanted my model to pose beforehand but I decided to leave most of the more minute details of each pose to spontaneity. My reasoning behind this was that in the past I have found this works best as I can easily direct my subject around efficiently.
7. Transfer the photos I have taken onto the computer via memory card reader, saving them into a new folder in the 'Pictures' folder. As a side note I have found it best to use a memory card reader rather than via the camera itself as it conserves camera battery levels.
8. Now, here is where it would get interesting and different for me. I usually would open up each file within the folder directly but I felt encouraged to try an organising program to edit out and whittle down my 'best' shots. I decided, rather by default admittedly, to use the organiser that came part and parcel with Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 - Adobe Organiser. Instead of editing the photos I thought looked best in preview format and process all of those I felt were potentially strong images in Elements 11's editor, I would try to use Adobe's editor and organiser in unison. I planned to use the feature of 'tags' within the organiser I knew existed to aid in selecting the 'maybes'.
9. Then I would open these files into the editor and process them.
10. After that I would make my selection of the final two images.
11. I would then save all the images to an external hard drive but they would be clearly labelled as 'nos', 'maybes' and the final couple.
12. Finally I would upload the final images to my blog.
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