Taking thousands of pictures is nice. Taking them in RAW format is nicer.
Working with RAW format files however, is not.
At least, it used to be an unpleasant experience. Nowadays there is some very nice software on the market to help you optimize your shoot to RAW to JPG workflow. For example Adobe Lightroom, Aperture for Macs, and Bibble 5 for me! I'm just using one solution in many, but it works very nicely for me, so it might work for you too.
Why RAW files and not just JPGs? The D90 does create wonderful jpegs, however I like to tinker with my images, and the extra bits of depth - 14 bit images vs 8 bit lossy compressed - allow me to tweak various settings without loosing any detail. This allows for amazing post processing tricks and effects. The usual complaints about working with RAW files is that they're much bigger, and that working with them is much slower. The current price of memory cards negates the first downside, and Bibble negates the latter. The only remaining downside of RAW files is that as soon as you've gotten used to working with them you'll forever cry about not having learned this trick sooner! :-)
My workflow
| stage: | shooting stage | copying stage | scanning stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| what happens: | I make pictures, and lots of them! During this process I'll check for composition, sharpness and histograms, since those you cannot "just fix" afterwards. Besides this: I try to make every picture a winner shot, but I'm not shy in taking loads of them in the mean time. | Cards full of images! I duplicate the card to my hard drive and to my external drive just in case a drive breaks down, and I'll import everything into Bibble. | Using Bibble I scroll through the images quicky, giving them ratings (using keys 1 to 5) on wether I like them or not. |
| neat tricks: | Know! Your! Camera! | Linux is your friend! | Know your hotkeys! |
| number of images: | +- 200 (100%) | +- 200 (100%) | 50 (25%) |
| time involved: | as long as it takes, and I am there, which usually coincides. | 5 minutes | 20 minutes |
| stage: | postprocessing stage | upload stage | and then... |
|---|---|---|---|
| what happens: | I now set Bibble to show only images I've rated, so I loose about 75% of the images. Using both batch selections and individual processing I go correct exposure and white balance where needed, when needed. For the images that I think deserve more attention I'll pull out the rack of processing effects and plugins Bibble has to offer. | I upload all images to my portfolio and a selection to Flickr. Zenfolio allows me to create protected galleries for clients with ease, so they can have the pictures as soon as possible. Often, I'll also upload a small selection to my Flickr account. | Customer care! In The next few weeks I like to communicate a lot with the client, just to see what they liked. Based on feedback I often go back to the postprocessing stage for some pictures and add or alter images. |
| neat tricks: | Use copy / paste to transfer settings from one image to another | Batch-tag, batch-upload, bach-sort! | Keep things organized! |
| number of images: | < 20 (10%) | 10 .. 20 (5% .. 10%) | 10 .. 20 (5% .. 10%) |
| time involved: | 2 minutes for regular images, up to 15 minutes for image I think deserve some attention. This is the fun part! | about 10 minutes to an hour depending on upload speed. | forever :-) |
So, why Bibble?
Oh I haven't answered that question yet? Hmm.. because:
- Most important: I just like the looks of the end results! The combination of plugins I use, Andrea, Brenda and Noise Ninja allow me to achieve the look I want for pictures with ease!
- It's fast! For me that means that it has to:
- allow the user to enter commands very quickly, Bibble has a great selection of customizable hotkeys for this. For example, I like the fact that pressing F produces a full rez JPG instantly, and I've configured shift-F to automatically make a small version with logo embedded for uploading to Flickr.
- be fast in giving results to the user, and allowing the user to enter responses to that. In this Bibble does wonders too - especially when compared to the Nikon software or to Adobe Lightroom. The workflow is very batch oriented, the user can work on other images will the computer is still crunching away on converting the previous images. Multi-core helps here too!
- I often use Seam n. Puckett's
plug ins: his
Andrea black and white conversion plugin, which simulates various types of real analogue production materials, is just awesome, andBrenda , a patch based color modification tool, can work wonders on some images! - Besides these Bibble 5 integrates Noise Ninja, which is ideal for fixing high ISO noise if I ever need to shoot in dark areas without flashes.
- Besides Brenda, Andrea and Noise Ninja there is a great variety of other cool plugins out there.
- It runs on Linux and Windows.
- It is relatively cheap, and well worth it.