Digital BW, The Print

Well, I always THOUGHT I was pretty well organized on my image 
processing for an amateur, although I recognize that if I did this for a 
living I'd have to tighten things up.  My image transfer from camera to 
computer usually goes smoothly - card reader to FROM CARDS folder on the 
computer with rename in the process, then a move to a new folder named 
for the event.  (For Christmas Night there are two folders, one for the 
family candids and one for a family group shot that is the traditional 
first page of the photo books I make for family members every Christmas 
- this year there were 11 books totaling ~400 prints, each 8x8 B&W.)  I 
almost always do the move from the From Cards folder to the "permanent" 
one immediately because otherwise my nightly backup process copies the 
 From Cards images to my external backup drives.  Ideally, the From 
Cards folder is always empty except when it's receiving downloads from a 
card, so I periodically go through the external drives to empty the From 
Cards folders of any images they may hold.

I use an image browser - usually Breeze Browser but sometimes IMatch - 
to cull the discards, and I then use IMatch to produce contact sheets of 
the images left in each folder.  These contacts are 4 rows x 5 columns, 
with a footer that prints a sequential contact sheet number and  the 
name of the folder name the images are in.  Those contacts get printed 
(double sided), punched, and go into a 3 ring binder.

For the most part, that's the end of my "workflow" until the end of the 
year, when my wife and I go through the contact sheets for the year to 
select the images that go into the Christmas books.  That too is pretty 
well organized - she checks the images on the contact sheets that MIGHT 
be book-worthy, I copy all of the checked images into a subfolder called 
Preliminary Choices under a new folder XMAS Book YYYY.  The images in 
that subfolder get their own contact sheets through IMatch, but these 
have larger images, 3 rows x 4 columns, for better analysis.

My wife then goes through those larger-image contacts and picks the ones 
that will go into the books (subject to my veto if I don't think the 
quality meets my standards - none of her iphone images made the cut this 
year, for example, as they were just ugly when cropped for 8x8, rotated 
to straighten 'em up and converted to B&W - but my wife otherwise has 
authority over content and distribution).  The final choices again get 
copied to another sub-folder called Selected, get a prefix of 001-XXX 
added to the file name for ease of reference, and another set of 3x4 
contact sheets made.  From these contacts, my wife fills out worksheets 
(spreadsheets) I've developed with one line per image and a column for 
each family member who gets a book.  She puts the image number in column 
1 and just checks the box under any person who gets that image.  
(Actually, there are several other columns, that I use to keep track of 
which images have been printed, comments about processing, a Front/Rear 
column I use to keep track of the printing of our personal copy of the 
book, which contains every image that anybody got, and which is done 
double sided to save shelf space - I've been doing these books for ~30 
years, which takes a lot of linear feet - and so on.)  I use those 
worksheets to process the selected images into 8x8 B&W files that get 
sent to a sub-folder To Print, and and then to keep track of what is 
printed, cut and bound into the books.

The interim folders of images (Preliminary and Selected) get deleted 
when the books are done.  I archive the To Print folder in case I should 
ever want to re-do an image, although I never have.  The original 
contact sheets get removed from the 3 ring binder and put onto posts in 
covers for long term storage.  (All of the interim contact sheets are 
done on plain paper for economy, and are pitched when they've served 
their purpose.)  And the 3 ring binder is ready to accept the current 
year's contacts as they are made.

I know I could probably use Lightroom's database powers to create the 
interim groups of images that I now copy into the sub-folders 
Preliminary Choices and Selected, without actually creating duplicate 
files on disk, but I'd then have to figure out how to get the contact 
sheets made in Lightroom instead of using my familiar IMatch process.  I 
may spend some time in 2013 exploring the Lightroom contact sheet 
process, but unless I can equal the simplicity of the IMatch process 
(add a folder to the IMatch database using the wizard, select all the 
images in the folder with Ctrl-A, click Export to Contact Sheet, select 
the contact sheet template from a list that pops up - the last template 
used will be used again unless you select something else - and click OK, 
at which point the software figures out how many sheets are needed, 
generates the contact sheet images - as jpegs - with the sequential 
sheet number and folder name in the footer of each page, and writes each 
sheet as a separate file in the Contact Sheets folder with the sheet 
number in the file name) I probably will stick with what I know for that 
part of our annual process.

I found that Lightroom's capabilities did dramatically improve the 
"Development" part of the process this year, as compared to handling 
each image in Photoshop with a P/S filter for the B&W conversion 
(originally Convert B&W Pro, last year Nik Silver Efex) as I had been 
doing since my switch from film.  Just the "trick" of synchronizing a 
1:1 crop onto each image in the Selected folder with a single keystroke 
made the whole process FEEL smoother and quicker.  Not having to go out 
to Photoshop for more than a handful of images that needed pixel level 
work sped things up, once I got comfortable with Lightroom's B&W 
options.  Not having to Save each image when I was done with it was 
another time saver. Periodically I just exported JPEGs to the To Print 
folder on the laptop that runs QImage and handles the printers in my old 
darkroom.  All of this kept things feeling like they were FLOWing.

So that's my process.  For those few times during the year when a few 
images need to be processed and printed I just do 'em one or a few at a 
time.  But mostly mine is an annual "business".

I welcome any suggestions for improving this workflow, especially any 
that can take advantage of Lightroom, which I admit I basically use only 
for its Develop functions, using the Library screen only to import 
(because it's required in order to be able to Develop) and to export to 
the printers.  I probably want to keep running the print functions on my 
separate laptop, in part because the printers are remote from the 
desktop on which the images are stored and processed, and also because 
of the QImage software for which I have developed a wide variety of 
templates.  Like the Xmas book pages, with an 8x8 at one end with 1/4 
inch margins and the file name printed at the other short end - the file 
name gets used as I sort the stack of prints into the 11 stacks 
(actually, old paper boxes) for each recipient, and is then cut off when 
the pages are trimmed for the slightly wider margin that takes the 
binding.  There's another template for the back side of the page, for 
our double sided book.  And the template for the Christmas cards, with 
two 4.5 x 4.5 images and two 1.5 x 4.5 greetings - just drag the images 
into the appropriate "holes" in the template and the current year's 
greeting into the other holes, select Print and enter how many copies 
you want.  They come out spaced so a 5 inch setting on my cutter fence 
splits the two card images and then trims the second one to the correct 
width, and a 7 inch cut takes off the excess at the bottom, giving a 
pair of 5x7 cards from one letter size page.  Would these kinds of 
things be easy to set up in Lightroom?

Thanks for any who can wade through this stuff, and thanks in advance 
for any suggestions.  Even if it's a suggestion to go read something 
specific about workflows.  The whole process has become enough of a pain 
(although SO much easier in digital than it was in a wet darkroom) that 
I'm always open to suggestions for improvements.

Cheers,
Kip


On 12/27/2012 8:30 AM, Seth Rossman wrote:
>
> KIp-
>
> You really need a workflow. The key word is flow.
>
> In a professional situation that would slow you immensely.
>


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