Having just finished three weeks editing other people’s pictures at Wimbledon and a further six days doing the same for the Open Championship golf the topic of workflow and getting pictures to look good, be accurately captioned and delivered efficiently wasn’t too far from my mind when a conversation with another photographer prompted me to write this. In the last month (and in the last eleven or so years that I’ve edited other people’s work) I’ve edited files from all of the professional cameras from Canon, Nikon and Sony. On a less intensive basis I’ve edited pictures shot on Leica, Fujifilm and Hasselblad and probably a few others that I can’t recall right now and so anything I say is based on the notion that a good workflow isn’t all that dependent on what types of files you have.

I’ve said it before and I will, no doubt say it again but having a good workflow is absolutely central to the business of photography. In fact, when I speak to colleagues and friends most will excitedly tell me that their personal workflow is as good as it gets and surprisingly few will openly accept that they might just be able to do it that little bit better with a bit of training and practice. Personally I lean the other way; spending way too much time looking at different software, trying different techniques and generally trying to get my workflow a few percentage points better.

There’s a folder of images on my hard drive on my desktop computer that gets brought out whenever I want to try something new. By now I know everything about those twenty pictures because I have edited them so many times in so many different ways.

It isn’t always about speed (although saving time is one of the things I love to do) and it isn’t always about accuracy (I make mistakes and would love to make a lot fewer). What it is all about is delivering the best versions of your production to where they need to go ahead of deadline and fulfilling the needs of the end users.

So that’s the rather overblown introduction to what I wanted to say. Workflow is a series of easily repeatable, often adaptable, technically sound and ultimately accurate steps. Those can be broken down as follows:

1. Acquiring the pictures. From memory cards or downloaded from servers – however you get them and wherever you access them is all part of the flexibility that is so important.
2. Sorting them. Whether you are editing every frame or whether you need to make selections and cull you need to get them into order so that you can move through the rest of the steps methodically and efficiently.
3. Captioning. Attaching the right words to the pictures as early in the process as you can makes sense. Using as many tools at your disposal as possible speeds this up and, done correctly, increases accuracy.
4. File names. Sometimes you need to rename files and sometimes you don’t. Once you know exactly what is required that will dictate where in the overall process this is done but, again, using the tools in the software will help to do this better and faster.
5. Cropping, toning and saving. This is often the most time-consuming and least automated part of the whole process. Getting these bits right is crucial and it is in this area that I spend the most time trying new applications.
6. Distribution. Get the pictures to the clients and end users quickly and in a way that suits you and them. There are so many options that agreeing this in advance is the best way to make sure that problems don’t arise later.
7. Backing-up. Once the pictures have been delivered make sure that they have been backed up properly and securely. Remember that at least three copies, at least one of which is off site is what you need to have at an absolute minimum to start to consider your fils to be secure.

Currently all of the above steps except number 5 take place in or with the support of Photo Mechanic. I’ve tried several alternatives but keep coming back to a piece of software that has been in my workflow for over twenty years in its various guises. I mentioned the word ‘tools’ and it is the various options (autocomplete, code replacement, variables, ingest, find and replace, drop down menus, snapshots, templates and more) that speed up the process and make it more accurate. At the moment almost everything else (step 5) happens in Adobe Camera RAW. The power of ACR is huge (the same tools also appear in Lightroom) and it gets better with almost every single update. Sometimes it’s a subtle but welcome improvement and occasionally it’s a big jump. The number of times that I need to actually open a picture in Photoshop itself has reduced drastically over the years and in my three weeks of Wimbledon and one week of Open Golf I only opened six files into Photoshop (out of well over 10,000) and three of those were just to refine something that I have since learned that I could have done in ACR.

Part of step 1 can require a decent FTP client application if you are downloading from a remote FTP server. I love Transmit but there are plenty to choose from and range from free to expensive with all stops in between. A lot of step seven is done using the Mac’s Finder application just moving stuff around and copying it when it doesn’t make sense to do it in Photo Mechanic and step 4 gets completely left out with quite a lot of the work that I do. With my own work I only change file names if that is a client requirement.

There is an eighth step (or more accurately step 7 ½) and that’s archiving but, given that that’s done entirely automatically in the dead of night by another application called NeoFinder running in the background I didn’t want to even complicate my workflow summary by adding it to the list.

If you are just editing your own work then having a slightly more complex workflow is fine. Editing as part of a team means that the way I work has to match the way up to six or seven other people work. If I hand over something to someone else in the middle of the process it is important that they can just step in, take over and finish the task. That’s quite a good discipline to abide by and the excellent side effect means that even if I am editing on my own I can stop what I’m doing, take on an urgent task and slot back in again as if nothing has changed. Sitting next to a team of excellent editors also means that we can all learn from one another and sharpen up what we do. If you haven’t ever tried it, I’d strongly recommend giving it a go.

I doubt that many of you reading this will be editing other people’s work on a regular basis which may well open up the choice of using Lightroom instead of Photoshop. I try to use Lightroom but in the end just revert back to Adobe Camera RAW out of familiarity and the choice to avoid building catalogues. In the next couple of weeks I will be trying out the latest incarnations of Capture One, DxO and a couple of others just to see if any of them can make what I do that bit better and more efficient.

There are so many things that you can do to make your set up better, faster and more efficient before you even have pictures to work with and here’s quick check list:

• Make sure that every camera involved in the process is set up properly. Camera clocks set to the correct (exact) time and date, camera file names set up properly and not left to the manufacturer’s default. Author and copyright fields properly set in cameras.
• Calibrate monitors so that colours are accurately rendered and compatible with the output colour space.
• Set up, check and load autocomplete files, code replacements, caption templates and snapshots.
• Load FTP addresses, server log-ins and any other details required for acquiring or distributing files.
• If you are editing other people’s files then a conversation with them about how they work, how they like their images to look and what they can do to help you get their images processed as efficiently as possible is always a very good idea.

So, yeah, workflow? It’s a bit boring. It’s not as creative as we would all want to be all of the time but it is also the difference between being good and being the best you can possibly be. If you are the photographer having others to do the workflow for you then you have to still know this stuff if you want your partnership with your editor to be as fruitful as it can be. It might be a personality fault of mine but I actually don’t find workflow all that boring. I guess that’s why I’ve written so much about it.

Anyway, that’s it… for now but if you have any specific questions about any of this I’m happy to answer them.

Footnote: I have the “men at work” road sign on the desktop of all of my computers. It’s actually the icon for a shared folder which is part of my Dropbox account called “work in progress”. After a lot of years it still amuses me and it serves to remind me that, no matter how much I enjoy what I do, it’s still work!