Making Copyright Part of Your Workflow

[by Jim Cavanaugh]

Photographers often cite one of the barriers to regular copyright registration is assembling the submission of images. In the old film days, it was a significant challenge to get physical copies of all your work in an acceptable form for registration.

In today’s digital world it is much easier to assemble a registration, especially if you’re taking advantage of the Copyright Office’s electronic registration or eCO. All that is required for the majority of submissions is a small j-peg copy of each image you would like to register.

Creating these j-peg images as part of your regular assignment workflow will make timely registration much easier. Most Image processing software’s common automation features can be used on large numbers of RAW files or other formats to create the smaller j-peg files.

Here is what I do. On each assignment, I create a web gallery for my clients to review using Adobe Bridge CS4. This web gallery is created from the edited raw files that have had global color and exposure corrections made. Once the gallery is created, I simply copy the j-peg files from the web gallery folder (Resourcses-Images-Large) into my copyright registration folder. At the end of each month, I register all of the images in the copyright folder.

A special note, creating the flash based web galleries in Bridge CS4 deletes all metadata from the j-peg files. I have a copyright registration metadata template with my contact and copyright information that I apply to all of the images.

Use a Validated Transfer

[by Peter Krogh]

Whenever you move the primary copy of your images from one drive to another, you should perform a validated transfer. This makes sure that all files are transferred, and that every bit in the original is also in the copy. Read about the process and watch a movie of it in action at dpBestflow.org.

Organize Your Image Collection with a Catalog

[by Peter Krogh]

One of the most powerful tools that we have for making the most of our photographs is an image catalog. Catalogs allow you to organize vast numbers of images into groupings that make sense to you. dpBestflow recommends that all photographers make use of catalog software as a critical component of file management and workflow design. Read about it here at dpBestflow.org.

Spending Your Money Wisely on Digital Image Storage

[by Richard Anderson]

With every New Year, digital photographers, (which is pretty much all of us now), face decisions about how to make room for a new years worth of image files.

Most of us have been shooting digitally long enough to know approximately how many gigabytes we create in a year’s time. It has inched up as we traded up to higher megapixel cameras of course, but the good news is that hard drives have become larger and cheaper. So what is the least painful way to accommodate these growing collections?

There has always been a lot of buzz about RAID enclosures, but I would propose that buying the largest available drives and arranging them in JBOD enclosures is the easiest, cheapest, safest, and most workflow friendly arrangement for digital image storage.

I’ll make my case:

• Easiest—Each drive needs to be backed up. Take a 2 TB drive and fill it to approximately 75% capacity. Now do the same with a second 2 TB drive. Now your hard drive storage is properly backed up. Easy!

Take the backup drive offsite for maximum protection. If that isn’t an option, keep the backup drive disconnected and only connect it when you need to synchronize with the primary drive.

• Cheapest—In a JBOD setup- you get full value of the drive cost because you get to use the whole drive for storage. With any RAID other than RAID 0, you lose some portion of the drive space to redundancy. With RAID 5, you will lose the entire capacity of one of those 2 TB drives. On an energy saving note, RAID arrays keep all the drives running when they are on. A JBOD enclosure can have drives on or off independently of each other.

• Safest— If RAID 5 didn’t have to be backed up, you’d come out ahead moneywise, but unfortunately RAID 5 doesn’t protect you from data loss due to equipment failure, file corruption, Fire, theft, or other disasters, so you will still need to back up all the data on the RAID, the same as you would for JBOD. I have discovered that many people don’t back up their RAID 5 setups because they focus on the word “redundant” and figure they’ll take the risk. Since JBOD is cheaper, there is less temptation to “cheap out” and not make your setup truly redundant.

An important fact that impacts safety is that in a RAID 5 setup, when one disk fails, there is a high chance that a second one will fail.  The theory behind the error correction in RAID assumes that failures of drives are independent. It is often the case that the drives making up the RAID are the same ages. Since all drives are on when the RAID is on, this means that they all have the same number of hours of use. This means that the chances of failure of all the drives in a RAID are statistically correlated. Occasionally, manufacturers have a run of bad drives. Think about what happens if the RAID is made up of these drives.

• Workflow friendly—RAIDs are great until you run out of space. At that point, you will need to offload ALL of the data on the RAID, rebuild it with larger drives (or get a bigger box), and then restore ALL of the data back. It can take 6 to 8 hours to migrate each 2TB of data using a validated transfer utility. If you skip the verification, you will save some time, but you can never be sure that every “bit” of your data has transferred and is uncorrupted. With JBOD, you can migrate your data to larger drives on a less hectic schedule because you only have to do it one drive at a time.

Data Robotics DROBO enclosures relieve some of the pain of scaling up your storage capacity because you can mix and match different drive sizes. DROBO enclosures still consume more drive space than JBOD however, and the data contained on a DROBO still needs to be backed up.

My advice is to stay away from the fancy boxes. Get a sturdy multi-bay drive enclosure and a double set of 2 TB drives. It’s Easier, cheaper, safer, and more workflow friendly IMHO.

For more information on hard drive storage go here.

Future Success

[by Rosh Sillars]

The last decade brought the standardization of digital photography, an increased interest in the craft and the commoditization of photographic images.

Many of the bread-and-butter jobs that once fed our families are now gone. Let it go and don’t look back.

Change is constant. Turn around and face the future. Technology, which has taken our opportunities, now offers new possibilities.

Photographers can be more creative than ever with higher quality image capture, unbelievable post processing and multimedia opportunities.

The Internet and social media have eliminated the barriers to sharing your vision with an international audience.  Photographers are connecting with people in cities, states and countries not even on the radar just a few years ago.

Over the next year we will hear more about real-time applications and augmented reality. People will become more connected, social and mobile.

In the future, photographers will need more creativity, communication and marketing skills to succeed.  One thing that will not change: people and relationships. They are and will continue to be the foundation of a photographer’s success.

Computational Photography

[by Jay Kinghorn]

As we close the book on the first decade of the 21st century and look forward to the next 10 years, computational photography looks to make the greatest technological impact on the craft of photography as we know it.

Computational photography is a broad, if imprecise, term most often used for any imaging techniques that expand upon the normal capabilities of a digital camera. Common examples are High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos or panoramas, the outcomes of which are digital photographs that could not have been taken by a traditional camera. Less established technologies allow a photographer to set focus and depth of field on their computer instead of in-camera.

Most examples of computational photography use multiple images to enhance the quality, or flexibility of a single image. For example, when using a high ISO setting in low light, a camera will automatically capture a quick burst of images. The image processing software (either on-camera or on the computer) compares the content of the images, separating detail from image noise. The noise is discarded and the detail preserved. Other techniques still in the lab use still photos taken at regular points during a video clip to improve the detail, tonal range and quality of video footage, or allow an artist to relight a scene in post-processing to tease out hidden detail.

These technological improvements should be embraced as they come to light, because they will allow photographers to capture, create and publish photos in new and even more compelling ways. While the tools of the future of photography are important, ultimately it’s the creativity and artistry that’s applied to them that will help people tell stories that continue to move, engage and inform.

Looking forward, a photographer’s ability to exploit new opportunities and assimilate new technologies into their workflow will be a defining characteristic of the future of photography. The profession of photography will be less about being a technician and more about being a visual artist fluent in the language of color, shape line and light who communicates across mediums with greater facility than any technician ever could.

Blu-ray Discs for Backup

[by Peter Krogh]

Consider Blu-ray disks as an way to backup your files. The dpBestflow project recommends that write-once media, such as CD, DVD or Blu-ray disk can provide needed protection for your valuable images. Many people feel that DVD is just too small, at 4 GB, to be worth the hassle. Blu-ray can hold 23 GB. Burners cost less than $200, and discs can be found for as little as $3 each. Read more here.

Five Boosts for your Photoshop Workflow

[by Jay Kinghorn]

Much of my consulting and training work with clients results in a faster, more consistent workflow and more time in my clients’ days. Below is a list of seven things you can do to speed up your image processing and take control of your workflow.

1) Actions: If you perform a step more than twice, automate it. Actions are simple to learn, quick to create and highly efficient. I frequently make job-specific actions to ensure consistency from file to file or job to job. Even small tasks like flattening layers or opening specific dialog boxes is faster when you assign a function key to an action. There’s nothing like processing an entire job by pressing a few keys and having Photoshop do the work for you.

2) A graphics tablet for retouching: If you perform your own retouching you owe it to yourself to invest in a graphics tablet. Not only will your retouching be more accurate, but you’ll save boatloads of time on your retouching.

3) Camera Raw Presets: Many photographers perform the same set of corrections for every camera raw file. Add five points of contrast, seven points of saturation and so forth. Save this information as either a preset or the default for each of your cameras. Better still is to create a DNG profile for your camera. These steps will apply a series of baseline changes to each raw file as they’re loaded into Adobe Camera Raw. You will likely need to perform shoot-or-scene specific corrections on top of the baseline correction, but you’re starting from a better baseline than the default settings in ACR.

4) Metadata templates: With the specter of Orphan Works legislation perpetually looming over the horizon, it pays to make sure your copyright information is stored in the metadata of every photograph in your collection. The best strategy is to enter this information early and do it automatically. Whether you use PhotoMechanic, Bridge or Lightroom for your initial edit, be sure to build, and apply, a metadata template to insert your contact and copyright photo in every image as it is downloaded to your computer.

5) Productivity plug-ins: Plug-ins can be a productivity black hole. “Hmm, should I use the mossy rock or brilliant sunrise filter on this image?” That said, productivity plugins can often remove noise, improve sharpness, enlarge images or eliminate backgrounds faster, and with better quality than doing it by hand. Here are a few of my favorites:
Noise:
- Noise Ninja

Upsizing/Enlarging:
- Genuine Fractals
- Blow Up

Cut-out/Background Removal:
- Fluid Mask

Sharpening:
- Sharpener Pro
- Photo Kit Sharpener

Be a Professional with dpBestflow

[by Jay Kinghorn]

Today, many photographers find themselves having to justify their creative fees and post-processing fees to clients. After all, it seems everybody these days has a digital SLR and a copy of Photoshop and thinks they can do it themselves. The truth is, your relationship with the client only begins with creating a compelling image. It is complete when the image is successfully reproduced in its final format.

Clients rely on you to know how to provide them with digital files that meet their technical needs and are delivered on time. With how quickly our industry is changing, you must make sure to use best practices for your digital workflow to stay organized, maximize image quality and keep clients happy.

The dpBestflow project, is a great guide to what works in digital photography workflows. Whether you need a high-level overview of best practices to compare your current system against or detailed info on a given topic like file-naming or backup systems strategies, dpBestflow puts this information right at your fingertips. Now it’s easier than ever to optimize your workflow so you can deliver creative projects to clients that meet both their creative and technical needs. Here are a few tips from dpBestflow that you can apply today.

3, 2, 1 backup strategy
Losing your images due to fire, flood, malfunction or theft would be catastrophic. Ensure  the safety of your files by storing them in at least three locations, on two different types of media with at least one copy stored off-site.

Raw Power
Use your raw image editing software to perform as many of your image corrections as possible. This gives you the best image quality and eliminates much of the need for destructive pixel editing.

Special Delivery
When delivering files to clients, be sure to include a Read Me file; a text file explaining the processes used in creating the file, including the color mode, ICC color profile, file size and image resolution, along with licensing rights and usage information.

Using the dpBestflow Website

[by Peter Krogh]

We’ve packed quite a bit of information in the website, so we thought we’d make a movie to show you how to navigate. We suggest you spend a few minutes looking over the video before you dive in.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think.

dpBestflow – Join Us Tonight!

[by Judy Herrmann]

On December 3, 2002, Dave Harp, the president of ASMP at the time, asked Richard Anderson, Peter Krogh and me to meet with him and Gene Mopsik in Baltimore. The ASMP Digital Standards Committee was born that afternoon and I don’t think any of us remotely imagined the full import of what we began that day.

Today, it is my great honor to invite you to celebrate the launch of a unique and powerful information resource: dpBestflow. The culmination of years of research and hard-won knowledge, dpBestflow provides best practices and workflows for photographers.

Now, best practices and workflows may not sound like the most glamorous topic in the world but if you’re like me, you’re dying to just put the constant time-suck of keeping up with technological change behind you and focus on making great images.  dpBestflow helps you do just that.

Efficient workflows lead to more productive use of your time.  They increase your profitability and give you more time to focus on important things like diversifying your skill-set, marketing your work, achieving your goals or even just having dinner with your family.   Best practices preserve your visual legacy.  They ensure that your data is protected and interpreted exactly how you intended – today and in the future.  Until now, figuring out how to achieve efficient workflows and embrace best practices has been a real challenge for photographers.

The dpBestflow team has done the homework for you.  Instead of culling through countless books and websites, trying to piece information together.  You now have a one-stop-shop for all things workflow related.  Got a burning question about a single topic like sharpening or storage media? You’ll find a distillation of exactly what you need to know.  Searching for guidance on a broad category like how to organize your files or keep your data safe?  On the dpBestflow website, you’ll find concrete answers including informative how-to tutorials and movies.

I invite you to join us tonight to celebrate the launch of this exciting new initiative.

7pm
Navy Memorial Auditorium
701 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington DC

dpBestflow is a Multimedia Learning Environment

[by Peter Krogh]

As Richard points out in yesterday’s blog, the dpBestflow project is a muti-dimensional, multi-media effort.  We know you are visual people, and for some subjects, a movie makes the point better than text. You’ll find quite a bit of content on the site that walks you through some workflow by actually showing it in action.

This six minute video outlines the creation of metadata templates in Photoshop CS4.

Introducing dpBestflow

[by Richard Anderson]

dpBestflow is short for Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow.

In August of 2007, the Library of Congress, through its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), awarded eight private-sector organizations funds to conduct research into the preservation of commercial digital artwork. The American Society of Media Photographers received a major award to fund a three-year project, dpBestflow.

There are three components to the dpBestflow project.

1.)  A book, I co-authored with Patricia Russotti, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology called Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow Handbook, (Focal Press, 2009).

2.)  A web site called dpBestflow.org , which is filled with information from the dpBestflow Handbook, and Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book (O’Reilly Media, 2009).

3.)   A traveling seminar series designed to enhance your workflow and provide you with the tools for proper preservation of your images.

The dpBestflow.org site will be going live on November 11. Everyone on the project team is excited and proud to bring this important resource to completion. We have high hopes that the information in dpBestflow will make your workflow easier and more efficient, lead to better cooperation within the larger graphic arts community, as well as, help the Library of Congress achieve its goal of preserving our digital cultural heritage far into the future.

I want my ASMP Video….

For as long as I have been on the ASMP board, first as Education chair and now as President, I have heard from members and chapter presidents that we need to know more about video / motion, that we should use video for our education programming and that video should be utilized on our ASMP website.

During the SB2 seminars we utilized video both in the live seminars and later to capture some of the key presentations. They are available on our SB blog as well as a free download at iTunes Podcasts; see link to the right or search ASMP at the iTunes Store.

I have been researching possible solutions for both video podcast and live streaming meeting options. I discovered one possible solution literally below my studio, Vivolive, a local Pittsburgh startup, had just launched a consumer / soho live streaming service at the Consumer Electronic Show. I have been experimenting with the service for a few months now and ASMP will use the service to broadcast for the first time, our ASMP Annual Meeting to members, wherever they are. Members will receive an e-mail link to attend this meeting online.

The broadcast will include a segment featuring ASMP’s Executive Director, Eugene Mopsik, discussing our current education and advocacy efforts. I will speak about some ASMP policy initiatives moving to the future. We will then invite ASMP member Jack Hollingsworth for our Keynote presentation, “Leveraging Social Media for Your Business.”

This ASMP Member Meeting Live Stream is a good test for a very affordable and simple solution for ASMP and our chapters who desire to broadcast their meetings.

One of the initiatives that I will be discussing at the Annual Member Meeting is the creation of a “Motion Study Group” to look at the business practices that we may need to address regarding the business side of Motion Production, as well how ASMP can use video more effectively in our communications and education platforms.

Tagging Images with GPS

[by Peter Krogh]

When I’m looking for one of my images, one of the most valuable tools I can use is the location list in Lightroom or Expression Media.  My awareness of where a picture was taken is deeply tied to my memory of that image. By using Country. State, City and Location tags, I can organize my images in a really useful way. (Add date information to this, and it’s even better.)

But adding that information can take some time. Furthermore, some locations are impossible to pin down with any specificity.  “Okavango Delta” is a pretty generalized location.  So how do you pinpoint images more accurately.  And even more important, how do you add the location names without endless retyping.

Enter GPS – Global Positioning Satellite. It’s possible to add GPS tags to your images, and it’s even possible to use those tags to fill out the IPTC location fields, so that the Country, State, City and Location tags show up in the program of your choice. Take a look at this movie to see a bit more about how this is done.

Do Your Know Your Trackpad?

[by Peter Krogh]

On Mac 10.5 and above, you can get a right-click by double-tapping your trackpad with two fingers.  Go ahead and try. (If you’re not already using a multi-button mouse, you literally don’t know what you’re missing.) There is all kind of functionality hidden in these “contextual menus”.  Clicking nearly any onscreen item pulls up a new menu. Make sure that you have “Tap Trackpad using two fingers…” checked in the Trackpad section of System Preferences.

Email Marketing

[by Carolyn Potts]

To get high email promo delivery rates, you have to consider many variables.

You’re probably already aware that without doing your email marketing homework, you’re more susceptible
falling back on the all-too-common, mass-blast strategy, nick-named “spray and pray”   Do that, and you’re inadvertently adding to the delivery problem.

If enough people persist in doing un-researched mailings, soon entire ad agencies will disappear off the
roster names available on valid list providers such as Agency Access and ADBASE.

Emails that don’t include a super-easy-to-use “opt-out” link, also add to the delivery problem as they’ll mark a promo as spam in an attempt to get off a list. They may not hate you, it’s that many prospects are just desperately trying to control their volume of email.

Spend some time reviewing email marketing research reports and/or using a reputable email-delivery service. A reputable service’s emails always get delivered. The major ISPs know who the good players are;
they won’t do business with anyone who behaves in a spam-y way. Those delivery services with higher barriers to entry, end up filtering out all but the most serious email marketers.

Because email spammers are highly-motivated individuals (or companies!) who work 24/7 to get past the filters, ISPs and email delivery services must CONSTANTLY adjust their filtering and formatting rules to combat a spammer’s strategy du jour.

If too-restrictive filters are employed, then too many legitimate messages get quarantined; if too lax,
customer’s in-boxes can become spam smorgasbords.  In either case, clients can become disgruntled and
move to another service provider that does a better job of filtering/delivering.

The formatting of a spam message sent last year (copy as well as image content), probably isn’t the same format as this year’s spam. Creating an CAN-SPAM compliant email promo is not a one-time event that is never reviewed or revised again.

The bottom line? The all-time best guarantee of message delivery still remains: employ a strategy to
make sure your recipient adds you to their address book.

Lightroom Tip: Save Your Metadata

[By Jay Kinghorn]

Save Lightroom’s metadata back into the original files by selecting images, then, from the Metadata menu, select Save Metadata to File. Alternatively you can use the keyboard shortcut Cmd+S (Mac) or CTRL-S (Win). This writes metadata into JPEG, TIFF, DNG and PSD files and writes metadata into XMP sidecar files for Camera Raw files. This helps to ensure your metadata always travels with your photos and helps you recover quickly should your Lightroom Catalog becomes corrupted.

Photoshop Quick Tip: Maximize Photoshop File Compatibility

In Photoshop’s preferences, under the File Handling tab, be sure to change the Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility from “Ask” to “Always.” Although this makes your file sizes larger, it ensures your layered Photoshop files will display correctly in other imaging applications like Lightroom, InDesign, Microsoft Expression Media and Extensis Portfolio.

Quick Tip Week – Build a Technology Plan

Most businesses think about business plans and marketing plans but it’s important to develop a technology plan, too.  Think about what new technologies (and skills) you need to invest in over the next year or two.  Include their costs in your CODB analysis and make sure you’re clear on how they’re going to help you increase your value so you can recoup the costs!

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