Prodution Question?

[Olaf]

My standard procedure, after shooting an event (ex. son's soccer game). I primarily use Photoshop Elements, although I do have Photoshop CS. I've found that program more friendly for quick editing.

1. Glance through and delete the duds
2. Go back through and pull the pics that I want to print
3. Try out "Quick Fix" on most of the photos, but end up backing out of that on most.
4. Fix the horizon line on about 10% (my own little problem )
5. Hitting the Auto "sharpen" once
6. Cropping set at 4x6 (my standard size print)
7. Save the file, adding a "p" to the name to indicate that this is a modified file, leaving the original untouched
7. Send (broadband) pics to Sam's Club or Shutterfly for printing

This is a very time consuming process. I typical shoot in the "large-fine" setting, so my files are over 3 MB. It does take awhile to send them to the processor. I've heard about batching, but I haven't quite figured out how to do that. Each of my photos seems to need something different, so I'm not sure that would work for me anyway.

There is the occasional pic that gets more tinkering, but what you see above is fairly standard. Is this pretty standard for everyone? It's very time consuming.

 

[Anewman]

My standard procedure, after shooting an event (ex. son's soccer game). I primarily use Photoshop Elements, although I do have Photoshop CS. I've found that program more friendly for quick editing.

1. Glance through and delete the duds
2. Go back through and pull the pics that I want to print
3. Try out "Quick Fix" on most of the photos, but end up backing out of that on most.
4. Fix the horizon line on about 10% (my own little problem )
5. Hitting the Auto "sharpen" once
6. Cropping set at 4x6 (my standard size print)
7. Save the file, adding a "p" to the name to indicate that this is a modified file, leaving the original untouched
7. Send (broadband) pics to Sam's Club or Shutterfly for printing

This is a very time consuming process. I typical shoot in the "large-fine" setting, so my files are over 3 MB. It does take awhile to send them to the processor. I've heard about batching, but I haven't quite figured out how to do that. Each of my photos seems to need something different, so I'm not sure that would work for me anyway.

There is the occasional pic that gets more tinkering, but what you see above is fairly standard. Is this pretty standard for everyone? It's very time consuming.

You can do steps 3,5,6, and 7 with one click of a button(not sure if Elements uses actions). I made actions for all print sizes that I regularly use(one landscape, one portrait), they to the exact print resolution the Noritsu at my local lab uses and it then saves to the folder I will then upload.

Just got home from movies, will share my workflow in the AM.

 

[Groucho]

Step one is more easily done with either thumbnails or a photo viewer. For thumbnails, either change the display in Windows Explorer to "thumbnails" or use another program - my favorite is (surprise, surprise) Irfanview Thumbnails, which is part of IrfanView. If the thumbnails aren't cutting it, you can use IrfanView to quickly flip through the photos and delete the ones you don't like. I've been doing this a lot the past few days as I finally have my photos backed up in duplicate and have started deleting the not-good-enough ones from my hard drive. I view in full-screen and use the arrow keys to go back and forth. If I don't want one, I just hit Del and then Enter to confirm the deletion. It's very quick and easy to go through the photos this way, much more so that opening then with Photoshop.

For step two, I assume that you have a separate folder set up to move the photos to. The easiest thing to do here is again use thumbnails, either Windows Explorer or Irfanview will let you ctrl-click to grab as many as you want, then drag them into the "to-print" folder.

Step three and four pretty much have to be done on a one-by-one basis since each photo will need different adjustments.

Steps five, six, and seven can be done in one movement using Irfanview's batch functionality. Hit "B" at any time from Irfanview to get to the Batch page. Check the box for "use advanced setting" and hit the Advanced button. From here, you can crop, resize, sharpen, adjust color, set DPI, change file naming settings... basically, nearly anything you could want.

There are two "sevens" so for the second seven, you're pretty much stuck doing it the way you're doing it, I assume - I'm not familiar with those services so I don't know if there are any shortcuts.

Basically - Photoshop is a resource monster and very slow to use. (But brilliant at what it does do!) The more you can do in a smaller, faster program like Irfanview, the faster your whole process will be.