In this article I will try to give you some hints on how to deal with images on a computer. Basically, it comes down to three main issues: Archiving, Editing and Printing. I have a lot of ideas about archiving, mainly because it took me a long time to figure out what the best method was for archiving very large amounts of digital images. I changed my system a couple of times, before I was completely satisfied! I will not deal with the editing of images in this article. There are so many good books on this issue and so many well written articles available on the Internet, I don't think I could make an important contribution here. I will however make a few remarks on printing at the end of this article, just to stop you from wasting too much paper and ink;-))


Archiving.

In the old days you had a map with inlays for the negatives and/or boxes for slides and a decent numbering plan or naming system to be able to find something on a later date. In principle that was all you needed, unless you did the printing as well, in that case you might have kept an archive of printsettings as well.

Digital photography changed everything! Not only are you bound to make more images (no more film and development to pay for), but the whole workflow changed. A good numbering plan or naming system is now more important than ever! It's not very practical to put all the images in one subdirectory on the harddisk, you might end up with thousands of images and then what? You need a system with a solid subdirectory structure.

Here's an example:
 

This is what I do when I come home with a couple of compactflash cards from the Nikon D200:

I copy the contents of the compactflash cards to the Workarea. I have a quick look with the Nikon View software and throw away the images that are absolutely terrible. I'm talking about images that are so bad, that I just have to get rid of them, so no one will ever see what a lousy photographer I am;-)) Then I create a new subdirectory under D:\Images\5_D200\Original\ with the appropriate name and copy the rest of the images to this new directory. I will never ever touch these originals again! And then I will decide what I'm going to do with the images in the Workarea. If they need editing, I will edit them, create a new directory under D:\Images\5_D200\Edited\ with the same name as the original directory and copy the edited images to that new directory. If there are images for panorama's, I create the panorama's, give them an appropriate name with a reference to the originals and copy them to D:\Images\2_Panorama\. The same goes for black & white. If there are images that are suitable for the website, I copy them to the proper subdirectory under D:\Images\4_Retsok\ and generate the webpages. And finally, I make all the necessary backups on disk and DVD, clear out the Workarea and format the compactflash cards.

If you're interested in the software I use, have a look at the Software and My computer article for more information.

So what if you need to hold more information with your images? No problem, just get an image archiving program, which basically is an electronic filing system. A good filing system catalogues all your images on your computer's harddisk and gives you the opportunity to add extra information for each image. That extra information can be one or more search arguments, printing data, or anything else you might want to retrieve at a later date. All that information is stored in an easy to access database. Although most image archiving programs have a lot more functionality built in, this is their MOST IMPORTANT function.

I use ACDSee from ACD Systems, here's how it looks:

 

You might also need a piece of software that can read, modify and backup the embedded EXIF-data or change the Windows file date. An example is the EXIF description field, where you can put any data you want. Another example is the date which is displayed in Windows Explorer. I want that date to be the creation date of the image and NOT the date that the image was created on the harddisk! And did you know that Photoshop totally ignores the Makernotes in the Exif-data when saving files? So when you edit a RAW or JPEG in Photoshop and save it, all the Makernotes are gone, and it just so happens that Nikon uses a field in there to tell you which lens was used with that particular image! There are a few EXIF utilities on the market. I use Exifer and EXIFutils.

OK, now you know what archiving is all about. I suggest that you use these ideas to design a system which is exactly right for you. When you're done, write a detailed workflow and stick to it!

Printing.

I promised to make a few remarks on printing, just to save you from wasting too much paper and ink. You can scan an image on a flatbed scanner, or a negative or slide on a filmscanner and you can import images from a digital camera. These three devices are called input-devices and each of these input-devices is technically completely different from the other. The output usually goes to the screen first, gets edited and cropped, or whatever and finally it gets printed. The screen and the printer are also technically completely different from each other and from the input-devices. Why that matters? Because of their technical differences, each device records a pixel from an image and the properties of that pixel, for instance the color, in a completely different way.

So when you get an image from your input-device and print it straight away, there will always be a difference between the input and the output. But even worse: the results will be unpredictable, the first image can be too red, the second too green and the third too dark! What you need is something that translates an input-device to an output-device, and the most important translation is of course from the screen to the printer. You need WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get. If you just edited your image on the screen and it looks absolutely stunning, it MUST come out exactly the same on the printer! Such a translation exists, it's called a Color Profile!

 

And this is where I keep my promise. You will save a lot of paper and ink if you learn how to calibrate your screen and how to use Color Profiles. I'll start with the definition: An International Color Consortium (ICC) Color Profile is a digital data file in a standardized format, containing numerical values, which define in absolute terms the complete color gamut of a device such as a scanner, camera, display, or printer. To make it work, every device (or working space) in your chain of devices must have its own Color Profile. Are you eager to set up your digital equipment the proper way? Just enter "color profile" in Google and start learning!

Oh, and don't forget, everytime you learn something new and improve the way you are working: Edit your workflow!

Have fun!