Category — Digital Workflow

Adding a copyright notice to your photos is critical before you send them out on the web or to clients. Fortunately, the task has just become a lot easier with Canon’s recently announced EOS 5D Mark II and 50D digital SLRs. Both cameras can be configured to automatically add your name and a copyright notice to each digital capture. [If you're not a Canon shooter, check out the links to important copyright sites at the end of this article.] [Read more →]

The cat’s out of the bag. “CS-Next” is now officially CS4. I woke up a bit earlier than normal this morning so that I could watch Adobe’s premiere webcast on East Coast time. If you attended the keynote at Photoshop World in Vegas earlier this month, you saw the entire Photoshop presentation that was made on this morning’s webcast. It was exactly the same. Kudos to NAPP for talking Adobe into giving the NAPP-Hardcore a sneak peak.

The bottom line with the official launch webcast is that it’s impossible to go into any depth on a family of 13 different programs and wrap things up in 60 minutes. If you really want to learn about what’s coming in CS4, check out these sites. [Read more →]

As a professional shooter, I use Lightroom as a standard part of my workflow. Over the weekend, I turned Lightroom loose on a long-overdue, personal project. I’m now more fond of Lightroom than ever. The reason? Lightroom found photos of my kids that I haven’t seen in years. [Read more →]

Just a reminder that tomorrow (September 23, 2008) is the day that Adobe will reveal the newest generation of their Creative Suite software. If you’d like to be the first on your block to watch the Adobe CS4 webcast, there’s still time to sign up for the free show. Click here before you get distracted (again).

The dates for the upcoming 2008/09 tour of the Epson Print Academy are now online. The 16-city tour starts in Atlanta on November 8. No specifics about pricing or curriculum have been released. Click here for the event calendar. I expect that more details will be released by the end of the month.

The last tour, held in 2006, offered two tracks at each venue –- one for amateurs and one for professionals. I attended the pro track in San Francisco and met Bruce Fraser, JP Caponigro, Greg Gorman, Jeff Schewe and Mac Holbert. I expect that the instructors on the new tour will be equally stellar.

I always look forward to the Epson Print Academy as a way to catch up the latest techniques. Even though I drive my Epson 3800 with a high-degree of confidence, I’m looking forward to attending the pro track in San Francisco next February. With the recent release of Lightroom 2 and the upcoming announcement of Photoshop CS4, I highly recommend the event regardless of your printer make and skill level.

I’m a big advocate of shooting tethered into Lightroom. Great synergies result when I send images from my DSLR straight into Lightroom.  Even on location shoots, I’ll tie my camera into my laptop. Here’s a run down of the benefits of tethered shooting - for both photographers and their clients. [Read more →]

If you are looking to add RAM or upgrade the hard drive on your Mac, check out IFixIt.com. I have never found more detailed, free, online guides for such a wide range of Mac hardware. Following their well-photographed, how-to guide, I changed out the hard drive on my MacBook Pro in a few minutes this morning. IFixIt sells all the parts and tools you’ll need to repair or upgrade your Mac or iPod.

These guys have personality. Curious about what’s inside an iPhone 3G? Just prior to the worldwide launch, they flew from California to New Zealand to be among the first in the world to buy one. And then they disassembled it.

Adobe has started shipping the 2nd generation of Lightroom (officially “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2″). I’ll say it up front, “I love Lightroom.” As a commercial shooter, Lightroom has become the backbone of my post-capture workflow. In my studio, Photoshop now handles only those things that Lightroom cannot do… which is much less now that Lightroom can handle many localized corrections.

Is Lightroom 2 perfect? No. Is it the best software around for one-stop handling of ingestion, DNG conversion, keywording, metatagging, sorting, ranking, RAW processing, exporting in multiple formats, creating slideshows and web galleries? Definitely yes. [Read more →]

Santa Fe Photographic Workshops has just posted their schedule for Spring 2009. This is the schedule only; individual course descriptions should be available by the end of September. I’ve taken a number of workshops at Santa Fe and have always had a great experience. If you are looking to take a workshop with guys like Joe McNally or Jay Maisel, register today. Their classes always fill up quickly. If you wait for the actual catalog to be published, your favorite course may be filled already. Santa Fe has a stable of great instructors that return every year to teach. They’ve also added a flock of new, yet equally great, names to their faculty (Michael Britt is a personal favorite as his High-Volume Digital Workflow seminars always speak to my inner-geek), To stay in touch with SFPW, subscribe to their e-newsletter and their blog.

Like many photographers, I am a voyeur. That’s why I love to read Death To Film - the blog of Image Mechanics.

IM is the gang of superheros based in Santa Monica that’s lead by Michael Britt (the fellow who wrote the original Lightroom user’s guide for Adobe.) As digital capture specialists, these guys have to manage as many captures in a day as most non-pro shooters will create in a lifetime.

The greatest thing about the Image Mechanics crew and their blog is that they share virtually all of their secrets. Check out the latest post about their off-line archiving system. Then just start scrolling through their archives. You’ll find tale after tale about being in the trenches of high-volume digital capture. Need more? Then jump over to the IM site for another long session of good reading.