Managing your photos

gertie · Mar 29th, 2007, 09:48

Hi all,

I'm just wondering how you go about managing your photo collection, especially the semi-professional photographers. I am relatively new to photography and I'm having lots of trouble!

Do you shoot in RAW or jpeg? If you shoot in RAW, how does your computer manage so many enormous files? If you shoot in jpeg, how do you edit your images without degrading their quality? I'm confused...

Also wondering about post production software - do you use photoshop? Is there an inexpensive way of obtaining photoshop? Or another program?

So many questions! I'd appreciate any help you can give me.

Gertie

karnail · Mar 29th, 2007, 10:56

As for as organising the photos is concrned, go for picasa, it's good and will meet almost all your requirements. For RAW and JPEG issue go according to your gear and requirments. Raw is meant for some very serious artistic work, for your day to day memories you dont need raw only jpeg.

nomad · Mar 29th, 2007, 11:02

picassa is good.

i am on Mac so i use iPhoto.

since you said you are semi-pro, i think paintshop pro or adobe photoshop elements can serve the purpose

tasuray · Mar 29th, 2007, 11:18

Hi,
First download the photos and burn it in a RW-CD.Make the corrections by Picasa, which is free to download or by Adobe Photoshop according to your profficiency in your HDD.Now corrected photos burn in another CD/DVD as you like.Now upload your phtographs to www.webshots.com or www.flckr.com or anywhere you like.Remove the photos from HDD and RW-CD. If you are an ameteur, in my opinion JPEG is sufficient.For intricate artistic work RAW or TIFF are mainly required. Morevover, RAW and TIFF are not available in all cameras.

kristinm · Mar 29th, 2007, 11:41

I can answer some of your questions but not in a short post - my partner is a professional photographer and I am a retoucher - I do all the photoshopping. Briefly though....

OK - we shoot in RAW for professional work but I see no need to shoot RAW for travel or amateur photography. I wouldn't and neither would my partner. The only real benefit of RAW is that the image is uncompressed so if you're outputting for large scale print you do not lose quality through compression - you'd output to a tif not a jpeg. Also I'm really good at photoshop - if you can't really use all the functions and power of a package like that & you have a decent amount of megapixel going for you so your images are big enough to print without massively blowing them up - then you may as well shoot in jpeg. I don't say that in a condescending way - just that it's not necessary for 90% of people. Spend the money on a bigger camera, save the money on computer hard drive space and photoshop!

Our main camera is 12 megapixels (Canon 5D) and the images are 35cm wide just as they come, they can go to A3 with no loss at all - I output to jpeg for most of our clients as they use them for advertisements of no more than a page, and they're using automated layouts and so on.

Do you have a good SLR camera? If so, a lot of the settings you can use are not preserved in RAW anyway and you have to do it all later in photoshop. A good camera and the large jpeg setting should be fine - you can still edit a lot and make a lot of changes later on even if you shoot JPEG, but once you use your camera's functions fully you'll find little need to do more than primp.

There are many tips about shooting in RAW and JPEG - go to one of the geeky photography forums where they discuss this stuff ad-nauseaum!!!!! My advice for jpeg would be don't go mad on the saturation or contrast or any of that stuff in the camera - keep it all pretty neutral and you can boost all that stuff later if you want. Learn your camera's idiosyncracies, for example, our Canon saturates green enormously but not reds.

Make sure your images are sharply focussed and that your light is in the right place and shots well composed - these things are the hardest to fix and fake! Remember digital cameras will warp your images as the sensor is small (unless you have one like ours with a big sensor), you can also correct this later so don't panic!

I am a photoshop devotee but it is very expensive and I believe there are other packages out there that are just as good... I've hard that there are shareware packages that are great, once again hit google or tucows and do some research.

So - we shoot RAW then the discs come home, are downloaded, images worked on, saved as jepgs then uploaded to our website where the clients can access them in password protected directories. After a few months I go through my hard drive, delete the raw files and archive the jpegs to disc.

The relevant bit of this for you and other travellers is the upload facility - I'm planning on using this on our trip to India. My website is hosted at GoDaddy in the US - a generous 10 gigs of space for only AUD$4.00/month. Prior to discovering GoDaddy and going offshore I used an Australian hosting company which gave me a pathetic 1 gig at $70/month!!!!!!!!!!

If I didn't already have a website I would do the following: Get a GoDaddy hosting account - no need to get a domain name,just use their facility (something like godaddy/your site....). I'd set up an htaccess directory on this site (it's really easy & now you're up to where I am now) then I'm going upload all the scanned copies of tickets passports and all that other guff so I don't have to carry it and can access it when I want.

I haven't researched an FTP upload facility yet which I can use from internet cafes and so on - I use shareware which lives on my computer, but there must be a way to do it on the run, I'm sure this exists, maybe even through GoDaddy - when I find one I'll let you know, Then I'm going to upload all our images as we travel straight up to the site where they can live in peace until we get home!

I live in fear of losing or wiping discs, and for this reason we shoot only on a maximum of 500 meg discs - the thought of losing thousands of shots in one go makes me feel ill.

Also - we have agreed not to take the 'good' cameras to India, as my partner will spend all his time looking through the lens and not living the experience & worrying about the camera and not letting anyone else have a go - so we are going to purchase a good little digital camera like a sure shot or something and we can all use that.

Believe me this is a major breakthrough!

I hope this is helpful - pm me or post again if you're completely confused!

cyberhippie · Mar 29th, 2007, 11:56

Just a quick point on uploading photos. Whilst it CAN be done in a lot of places it will be extremely time consuming!! Franchises like Sify I way and Reliance offer the best cyber cafes for this kind of thing. Independant cafes vary greatly in their equipment and computers per modem!!

I'm also a photoshop fan, one useful tool for editing your photos is recording an action this is like a small macro you can record within photo shop. So you could tell it to crop, reduce image size and compress the image further. You can then use this action to batch edit hundreds of photos in exactly the same fashion. It saves on the tedious task of doing it by hand one at a time!!

Thanks to kristinm for the info above, it will come in handy as I've just bought my first DSLR, a Nikon D50 which in combination with the Tamron 28-300 lens I'm over the moon with!!

arunchs · Mar 29th, 2007, 12:30

One more vote for Picassa. But one thing of note - do not get too possessive about your images. If you think it is not a good frame, throw it away. If you decide to keep all the images you shoot, it can become a pain to add storage space and maintaining them even with Picassa won't get any easy.

nomad · Mar 29th, 2007, 12:42

www.smugmug.com is the place to store/backup your images. 40$ a year and you get unlimited space. even if your harddrive crashes, you can ask them for backup CDs.
comes with very good uploader program for both windows and Mac. - just drag and drop.

i am stuck with pbase. will soon be live at smugmug

and iPhoto is better than Picassa :-)

cyberhippie · Mar 29th, 2007, 12:46

So how have you guys found uploading in India? I find it slow to bloody tedious!

I'll go with my photo wallet and burn to disc as a secondary back up. Uploading just takes up too much of my day!

kristinm · Mar 29th, 2007, 12:57

Oh really??? Do I have to rethink? I was feeling very clever - I was relying on being able to do it as I went along & not carry cds and all that rubbish, I though Indian connections would be zippy - you know being the cyper centre and home of all the geeky geeks!

cyberhippie · Mar 29th, 2007, 13:01

If your uploading a lot of stuff (and you sound like you might do) it can be a pain. India internet speeds aren't that good yet 256kbps is considered pretty good in most places (this will be shared between x number of computers)

However listen to others experiences I've not uploaded stacks of photos because of my experience in cafes I've never bothered, uploading blogs and files was bad enough!!

cyberhippie · Mar 29th, 2007, 13:07

Kristinm you do know I'm going to be pestering you with all kinds of questions about photoshop now

Did you know there's a photoshop lite out there that fits on a thumbdrive??

Nick-H · Mar 29th, 2007, 13:15

Slow to bloody-tedious indeed! And that is with my own home 256k (they call that broadband here

) connection. The upload speed is 64 or something pathetic.

iWay may not be too bad. Before I had my own home I used to spend an hour or two a day in an iWay, and found the performance pretty good for browsing --- but I never tried uploading, and did sometimes get stuck with blurry monitors or sticky keyboards.

Sify has internet infrastructure, as does Reliance, so I would expect those two to stand out.

I tried Picasso: I liked the PC software, thought the site looked good --- but after three days of failed uploads I gave up and have gone back to flickr.

And I only upload 800*600s just to tell others, see the pics here, not for storage or archiving. To many of you they would be thumbnails!

jennyandernie · Mar 29th, 2007, 13:38

We are semi professional photographers (due to being retired and a bit old lol). Here is how we handle our photography.

We shoot mainly in JPEG as in our opinion RAW is only required when you plan to make large prints. There are some people who think that shooting in RAW puts them a cut above the amateur; they are kidding themselves. One of our cameras is a Canon 1Ds Mkll with a full frame ccd and the files are 16M pixels in RAW ! We did a number of tests and found that on a PC it was very hard to tell the difference between files shot and processed as RAW and saved as TIFF and files saved as a high quality JPEG.

We post process in Adobe Photoshop; always ! Every photograph needs some work to improve it.

The processing is done on a dual processor PC which has two 750 GByte hard drives. One drive is used purely as a backup so that all the photographs we have are on two discs in case one goes down. At the end of the year we archive all that years photographs and burn the archive on to DVDs. The archive is also kept on the backup drive.

When away from home we carry a number of large capacity (2 and 4 G) memory cards to accomodate the large number of photographs we take. We used to carry a couple of X drives but large memory cards are so inexpensive now it is hardly worth taking the extra kit.

On a final note for our web site we size all the photos to a screen size and save them as "save to web". This reduces the quality a lot but does reduce the file size to an average of 50K which makes it easier for people to browse the web. To upload to our web site we use Terrapin Ftp and find it extreemly good and easy to use.

Jenny

cyberhippie · Mar 29th, 2007, 13:45

Since there are so many photographers here I've a question. I'm a rank amateur when it comes to photography.

As I said above, I've bought my first entry level DSLR a D50 and with the Tamron 28-300 lens I think I'm covered for most scenarios. Is there any other lens/lenses you pros would carry on a trip to India???

Sorry if I'm a bit off topic (really excited with my new toy, it's wonderful)

Mar 29th, 2007, 09:48	#1
gertie Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Chennai Posts: 156	Managing your photos Hi all, I'm just wondering how you go about managing your photo collection, especially the semi-professional photographers. I am relatively new to photography and I'm having lots of trouble! Do you shoot in RAW or jpeg? If you shoot in RAW, how does your computer manage so many enormous files? If you shoot in jpeg, how do you edit your images without degrading their quality? I'm confused... Also wondering about post production software - do you use photoshop? Is there an inexpensive way of obtaining photoshop? Or another program? So many questions! I'd appreciate any help you can give me. Gertie

Mar 29th, 2007, 11:02	#3
nomad Maha Guru Member Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Singapura Posts: 609	picassa is good. i am on Mac so i use iPhoto. since you said you are semi-pro, i think paintshop pro or adobe photoshop elements can serve the purpose __________________ Rahul Verma http://rverma.smugmug.com www.pbase.com/rverma

Mar 29th, 2007, 12:30	#7
arunchs Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Bangalore Posts: 278	One more vote for Picassa. But one thing of note - do not get too possessive about your images. If you think it is not a good frame, throw it away. If you decide to keep all the images you shoot, it can become a pain to add storage space and maintaining them even with Picassa won't get any easy. __________________ My India travel blog and my Images from India

Mar 29th, 2007, 13:15	#13
Nick-H Loud-mouthed, Noisy Bird Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: Chennai, India Posts: 25,846	Slow to bloody-tedious indeed! And that is with my own home 256k (they call that broadband here ) connection. The upload speed is 64 or something pathetic. iWay may not be too bad. Before I had my own home I used to spend an hour or two a day in an iWay, and found the performance pretty good for browsing --- but I never tried uploading, and did sometimes get stuck with blurry monitors or sticky keyboards. Sify has internet infrastructure, as does Reliance, so I would expect those two to stand out. I tried Picasso: I liked the PC software, thought the site looked good --- but after three days of failed uploads I gave up and have gone back to flickr. And I only upload 800600s just to tell others, see the pics here, not for storage or archiving. To many of you they would be thumbnails! __________________ . Just one member of the IndiaMike Mod Team*

Mar 29th, 2007, 13:38	#14
jennyandernie Member Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Suffolk, UK Posts: 32	We are semi professional photographers (due to being retired and a bit old lol). Here is how we handle our photography. We shoot mainly in JPEG as in our opinion RAW is only required when you plan to make large prints. There are some people who think that shooting in RAW puts them a cut above the amateur; they are kidding themselves. One of our cameras is a Canon 1Ds Mkll with a full frame ccd and the files are 16M pixels in RAW ! We did a number of tests and found that on a PC it was very hard to tell the difference between files shot and processed as RAW and saved as TIFF and files saved as a high quality JPEG. We post process in Adobe Photoshop; always ! Every photograph needs some work to improve it. The processing is done on a dual processor PC which has two 750 GByte hard drives. One drive is used purely as a backup so that all the photographs we have are on two discs in case one goes down. At the end of the year we archive all that years photographs and burn the archive on to DVDs. The archive is also kept on the backup drive. When away from home we carry a number of large capacity (2 and 4 G) memory cards to accomodate the large number of photographs we take. We used to carry a couple of X drives but large memory cards are so inexpensive now it is hardly worth taking the extra kit. On a final note for our web site we size all the photos to a screen size and save them as "save to web". This reduces the quality a lot but does reduce the file size to an average of 50K which makes it easier for people to browse the web. To upload to our web site we use Terrapin Ftp and find it extreemly good and easy to use. Jenny __________________ We have posted our photos on our website at http://www.jennyandernie.co.uk/India/India%2001.htm

Mar 29th, 2007, 10:56	#2
karnail Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Delhi Posts: 153	As for as organising the photos is concrned, go for picasa, it's good and will meet almost all your requirements. For RAW and JPEG issue go according to your gear and requirments. Raw is meant for some very serious artistic work, for your day to day memories you dont need raw only jpeg.

Mar 29th, 2007, 11:18	#4
tasuray Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Kolkata Posts: 305	Hi, First download the photos and burn it in a RW-CD.Make the corrections by Picasa, which is free to download or by Adobe Photoshop according to your profficiency in your HDD.Now corrected photos burn in another CD/DVD as you like.Now upload your phtographs to www.webshots.com or www.flckr.com or anywhere you like.Remove the photos from HDD and RW-CD. If you are an ameteur, in my opinion JPEG is sufficient.For intricate artistic work RAW or TIFF are mainly required. Morevover, RAW and TIFF are not available in all cameras.

Mar 29th, 2007, 11:41	#5
kristinm Member Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Beautiful Bondi (not Bundi!) Posts: 1,410	I can answer some of your questions but not in a short post - my partner is a professional photographer and I am a retoucher - I do all the photoshopping. Briefly though.... OK - we shoot in RAW for professional work but I see no need to shoot RAW for travel or amateur photography. I wouldn't and neither would my partner. The only real benefit of RAW is that the image is uncompressed so if you're outputting for large scale print you do not lose quality through compression - you'd output to a tif not a jpeg. Also I'm really good at photoshop - if you can't really use all the functions and power of a package like that & you have a decent amount of megapixel going for you so your images are big enough to print without massively blowing them up - then you may as well shoot in jpeg. I don't say that in a condescending way - just that it's not necessary for 90% of people. Spend the money on a bigger camera, save the money on computer hard drive space and photoshop! Our main camera is 12 megapixels (Canon 5D) and the images are 35cm wide just as they come, they can go to A3 with no loss at all - I output to jpeg for most of our clients as they use them for advertisements of no more than a page, and they're using automated layouts and so on. Do you have a good SLR camera? If so, a lot of the settings you can use are not preserved in RAW anyway and you have to do it all later in photoshop. A good camera and the large jpeg setting should be fine - you can still edit a lot and make a lot of changes later on even if you shoot JPEG, but once you use your camera's functions fully you'll find little need to do more than primp. There are many tips about shooting in RAW and JPEG - go to one of the geeky photography forums where they discuss this stuff ad-nauseaum!!!!! My advice for jpeg would be don't go mad on the saturation or contrast or any of that stuff in the camera - keep it all pretty neutral and you can boost all that stuff later if you want. Learn your camera's idiosyncracies, for example, our Canon saturates green enormously but not reds. Make sure your images are sharply focussed and that your light is in the right place and shots well composed - these things are the hardest to fix and fake! Remember digital cameras will warp your images as the sensor is small (unless you have one like ours with a big sensor), you can also correct this later so don't panic! I am a photoshop devotee but it is very expensive and I believe there are other packages out there that are just as good... I've hard that there are shareware packages that are great, once again hit google or tucows and do some research. So - we shoot RAW then the discs come home, are downloaded, images worked on, saved as jepgs then uploaded to our website where the clients can access them in password protected directories. After a few months I go through my hard drive, delete the raw files and archive the jpegs to disc. The relevant bit of this for you and other travellers is the upload facility - I'm planning on using this on our trip to India. My website is hosted at GoDaddy in the US - a generous 10 gigs of space for only AUD$4.00/month. Prior to discovering GoDaddy and going offshore I used an Australian hosting company which gave me a pathetic 1 gig at $70/month!!!!!!!!!! If I didn't already have a website I would do the following: Get a GoDaddy hosting account - no need to get a domain name,just use their facility (something like godaddy/your site....). I'd set up an htaccess directory on this site (it's really easy & now you're up to where I am now) then I'm going upload all the scanned copies of tickets passports and all that other guff so I don't have to carry it and can access it when I want. I haven't researched an FTP upload facility yet which I can use from internet cafes and so on - I use shareware which lives on my computer, but there must be a way to do it on the run, I'm sure this exists, maybe even through GoDaddy - when I find one I'll let you know, Then I'm going to upload all our images as we travel straight up to the site where they can live in peace until we get home! I live in fear of losing or wiping discs, and for this reason we shoot only on a maximum of 500 meg discs - the thought of losing thousands of shots in one go makes me feel ill. Also - we have agreed not to take the 'good' cameras to India, as my partner will spend all his time looking through the lens and not living the experience & worrying about the camera and not letting anyone else have a go - so we are going to purchase a good little digital camera like a sure shot or something and we can all use that. Believe me this is a major breakthrough! I hope this is helpful - pm me or post again if you're completely confused!

Mar 29th, 2007, 11:56	#6
cyberhippie Account Closed by User's Request Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: the Netherlands Posts: 6,013	Just a quick point on uploading photos. Whilst it CAN be done in a lot of places it will be extremely time consuming!! Franchises like Sify I way and Reliance offer the best cyber cafes for this kind of thing. Independant cafes vary greatly in their equipment and computers per modem!! I'm also a photoshop fan, one useful tool for editing your photos is recording an *action* this is like a small macro you can record within photo shop. So you could tell it to crop, reduce image size and compress the image further. You can then use this *action* to batch edit hundreds of photos in exactly the same fashion. It saves on the tedious task of doing it by hand one at a time!! Thanks to kristinm for the info above, it will come in handy as I've just bought my first DSLR, a Nikon D50 which in combination with the Tamron 28-300 lens I'm over the moon with!!

Mar 29th, 2007, 12:42	#8
nomad Maha Guru Member Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Singapura Posts: 609	www.smugmug.com is the place to store/backup your images. 40$ a year and you get unlimited space. even if your harddrive crashes, you can ask them for backup CDs. comes with very good uploader program for both windows and Mac. - just drag and drop. i am stuck with pbase. will soon be live at smugmug and iPhoto is better than Picassa :-)

Mar 29th, 2007, 12:46	#9
cyberhippie Account Closed by User's Request Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: the Netherlands Posts: 6,013	So how have you guys found uploading in India? I find it slow to bloody tedious! I'll go with my photo wallet and burn to disc as a secondary back up. Uploading just takes up too much of my day!

Mar 29th, 2007, 12:57	#10
kristinm Member Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Beautiful Bondi (not Bundi!) Posts: 1,410	Oh really??? Do I have to rethink? I was feeling very clever - I was relying on being able to do it as I went along & not carry cds and all that rubbish, I though Indian connections would be zippy - you know being the cyper centre and home of all the geeky geeks!

Mar 29th, 2007, 13:01	#11
cyberhippie Account Closed by User's Request Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: the Netherlands Posts: 6,013	If your uploading a lot of stuff (and you sound like you might do) it can be a pain. India internet speeds aren't that good yet 256kbps is considered pretty good in most places (this will be shared between x number of computers) However listen to others experiences I've not uploaded stacks of photos because of my experience in cafes I've never bothered, uploading blogs and files was bad enough!!

Mar 29th, 2007, 13:07	#12
cyberhippie Account Closed by User's Request Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: the Netherlands Posts: 6,013	Kristinm you do know I'm going to be pestering you with all kinds of questions about photoshop now Did you know there's a photoshop lite out there that fits on a thumbdrive??

Mar 29th, 2007, 13:45	#15
cyberhippie Account Closed by User's Request Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: the Netherlands Posts: 6,013	Since there are so many photographers here I've a question. I'm a rank amateur when it comes to photography. As I said above, I've bought my first entry level DSLR a D50 and with the Tamron 28-300 lens I think I'm covered for most scenarios. Is there any other lens/lenses you pros would carry on a trip to India??? Sorry if I'm a bit off topic (really excited with my new toy, it's wonderful)

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