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A
digital workflow with Nikon DSLR
Starting
with the digital photography back in 2001 with a Olympus E-10 I had quite a lot
to learn about handling, captioning and storing digital files. Since Oktober
2002 I own a D-100, which I use mainly for all my work (books, magazines and
journalistic stuff), only in landscape photography I still use sometimes my Mamiya 7.
What
was the problem ?
If you use a software like “Fotostation” which is included to Nikon digital cameras, you can caption your images, it works not only with tif and jpg but also with raw files - fine, but as many other programs these captions can only be read by "Fotostation" - bad (a positive exception is imatch - it can read the caption made with fotostation !)
My workflow:
On
long trips I have my laptop with me. Normaly I transfer my pictures to
the harddisk every day, check them, delete some of them and then make a first backup CD.
If
the weather is not good, I take my computer (Ok, honestly not always, sometimes I
also read a book and relax) and make a closer review of my pictures and start to
caption them. I use "imatch" because it can caption the raw files
(iptc standard) like
"Nikon View"
! But "imatch" can do this also in batch mode for multiple images (why
"Nikon View"
can not do this is a mystery to me). As everyone might have experienced it is
much easier to caption images immedeately after the shooting of the picture than
maybe a month later. Because of the bad quality of the Tft screen on laptops I
don`t do any color corrections and normaly I am busy enough with the captions.
So back home the pictures are transferred from my laptop to my home computer, if
they are not on an external firewire harddisk drive already.
Because
of the enthusiastic critics mainly for the raw converter of Capture One, but
also for the photoshop raw plug in (Capture One DSLR LE costs only 99 $ and has
a trial version !), I was tempted to buy this software instead of using the
Nikon Capture Editor I had already bought. I think that both programs (Capture One and photoshop) are very good, but they destroy the IPTC Data ! I find
this simply unacceptable for my workflow, because I would have to caption again
all tifs and jpgs!
Therefore
I tried to learn to do the adjustments with the Nikon Capture Editor, and although
the fine adjustments for color in the Nikon software are not that user-friendly,
I got the same results as with Capture One after some practise.
But
there is more benefit to the Nikon software than keeping the iptc data.
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I
start with my work in Nikon View, look at the pictures and open those, which
need adjustment, via a shortcut in the editor
In
the nikon editor there are shortcuts for saving the adjustments and applying
them on the next pictures, also “save” has a shortcut – a very fast workflow.
The
picture
is saved in Nef – the preview picture is shown in the optimized version !
If you open the
picture again, all manipulations are shown and can be altered or switched off
again back to the original setting !
In Nikon View an altered picture gets a special sign, very practical for me to
keep track on the pictures, which I have already worked on.
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for larger preview
With this workflow
it is possible to create tif files on demand, with all the adjustments made ! (
You have to choose in the batch menu of Nikon Editor "apply the nef files
settings"). If I need a selection for a magazine I simply choose them via
"imatch"
or Nikon View, copy (not move !) them to a working folder and start the batch of
Nikon Editor. Creating tifs of nef files does not consume much time, it takes about 14 minutes
for 100 pictures on a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with 1 GB Ram !
And
all the tifs are iptc captioned as this is also added to the files via the batch
process (or nikon editor does not destroy this information).
I
strongly recommend iptc because it is the standard in captioning pictures all
over the world and this is what photoshop can read in “file information”.
You can only be
more productive with digital photography if your workflow is fast, accurate,
dealing with the world standards, so every pro can read your information and
your data is not too space consuming. One nef file has a size of about 9,8 MB, the
resulting tifs have a size of 17,7 MB, so I can store more than
20 000 raw pictures on a 200 GB firewire harddisk. Using tifs you can store 11300, but
for any correction you have to insert the correct CD with the backup of your nef files (it is
likely that for a selection you have to insert more than one CD and searching and inserting
will consume a lot of time) or you store the nef files in a
separate folder, then you can store 7325 files on an external hard disk, still a lot,
but for professionals and even amateurs pictures add up fast, sometimes too
fast. A solution, which can hold my output of a whole year in a single
unit, is therefore much easier, faster and cheaper for me. And it is certainly a
benefit if I store them on
a fast and instant accessible hard drive .
There is one problem left: Although a 17 MB tif file of a digital camera is equal to lets say a 4000 dpi scan of a slide, witch has 50 MB, many people involved in the photographic businesss still think that "bigger is better" (more resolution).
So
if you supply them with the perfect tif files of your digital camera, they might
get a problem for printing them larger than A4, which they can do with a slide
which is scanned with at least 4000dpi on a Nikon or drum scanner. (They certainly
could do it with the digital file, if they would know about upsizing, but some
guys in this business still don´t know about sharpening too and blame the
photographer for “unsharp” pictures instead their lack of understanding
digital files). So the myth stays in their heads that slide film is superior to
digital files. Therefore some professionals upsize their images with genuine
fractals or stairway interpolation to a size of A3/300dpi 8 bit which leads to a
50 MB file similar to a 4000 dpi scan. Upsizing with these programs is quite a time
consuming process which leads to marginally better results. I would recommend
that you do also the upsizing on demand with bicubic interpolation in Photoshop
(just a few seconds per picture), because you can only apply upsizing in
Nikon capture with all the other adjustments but not seperatly for a number of
pictures. There
is a good article on Luminous
Landscape about different software solutions for upsizing). Otherwise you
have to pay a lot for external
harddrives, because with upsized tif + raw files it leads to 3333 files per 200
GB, so that you would need 6 hard drives and 6 times the amount of CD´s or DVD´s for backup (for 20 000
pictures).
As
a play with numbers is often only partly true, much depends on the kind of work
you do.
I also do a lot of panoramic pictures which I stitch in photoshop and often I
use two pictures if the contrast is too high (digital blending). Or I make
Infrared pictures and also for architecture I have to do the adjustments in
Photoshop and save the files as tif. So as I don´t keep all of the 20 000
pictures I have shot (12 –15000 is more realistic)
I also can´t work only with “raw manipulation”, a lot of pictures
can only be stored as tif.
This
sounds like a “payed” positive artikel for Nikon. But I do not have any
links to this company and there is still a lot of improvement to do to get their
software perfect.
So
the main thing for me is to have the
possibility of captioning my raw files immedeately after shooting and keeping that
information also in a tif or jpg file. Sad enough the raw converters of Capture
One and Adobe have not managed to do
so, therefore I would recommend to use the Nikon Capture Editor. For special
adjustments you can still use photoshop afterwards.
There
is another
reason that I do not want to produce too many tif files: I am very
sure that many of my state of the art picture corrections will look very poor to
me after a few months of further practice. That is another reason why I like
this “raw manipulation”.
Update 01-11-2003:
With the new functions of Nikon Capture 4 this "raw manipulation" might get even more practical, for me the "Image dust off" and the Digital DEE™(Dynamic Exposure Extender) tools look very interesting.
Update 07-01-2004:
But sadly the function Digital DEE is very unpractical in use, because nikon capture calculates it from the whole raw file, which is very slow.
The raw converter in Photoshop CS does not destroy iptc data of nef files when converted to tif or jpg, thanks to Adobe !
Suggestions
to this workflow are welcomed !
Christian Handl