Starving Artistry

Posts Tagged ‘Photo’

My OLD digital picture workflow

// January 1st, 2011 // No Comments » // Instructables, Photo

I woke up with my hair like this today. What do you think? Tay says it’s a natural Faux Hawk. All the look, none of the effort! My brother in law says it looks like anime hair. Really, it’s just a result of bed head. ^_^

My awesome self-pic

So as I take more and more photos, my computer is becoming more and more cluttered with the photos. I don’t really ever want to delete any photos because… you know, WHAT IF I want to go back and re-edit one? Anyway, I am restructuring the way I store and edit my photos, but for most of you out there that are just getting into lightroom and/or photo documenting your life, this is how I used to do it.

The beauty of lightroom (link) is that it never touches your original files. You load the photos into the program, make your edits, create as many different versions of the same photo that you want, then you can export all the edits to create new photos which are ready to be uploaded wherever you want them to go.

Here is my process when I load my photos into my computer for editing, then uploading:

My Monitor has a CF Card Reader

So I put in my memory card, and open up my computer so I can create a new folder. I always use the current date, rather than the date the photos were taken. I then go find the pictures on the memory card and drag them over.

Create a New Folder — Name it the Current Date

Then I open up lightroom and drag the files into lightroom. A screen pops up asking if I want to import them, to which I, of course, say yes.

Import the Photos into Lightroom

Remember, lightroom doesn’t actually move any of your photos, so right now all you’re doing is telling lightroom where to access the photos so you can manipulate them. Once I’m done editing, I will highlight the photos (the keepers) I want to export, and then right click, then go to “export.”

Export to bring up the next dialog box

A new box will open up with a bunch of options. The biggest concern is WHERE it’s exporting to, which you can set up there at the top. I always put new exports in a sub-folder, which you can create each time you export. You can see here with these photos from my NYE lunch, that’s what I called my subfolder.

Name the Subfolder something relevant to the picture set!

I export the files twice. I export once at full size (each photo is like, 7 – 10 megabytes) and once re-sized for emailing and uploading to facebook and flickr.

Re-Name the set with the moniker “small” and Resize!

I find that 1024 on the long edge is usually small enough for every day emailing and viewing without sacrificing too much of the image size. The only reason you’ll ever need those bigger photos is for printing out the photos into physical medium larger than a 4×6 photo.

Now that I have these photos, it’s time to upload them to your favorite file sharing service! Most people use facebook, as do I, but they always make the photos look like crap. So for embedding on my blog, I use flickr (link).

Once they’re uploaded to flickr, I grab the embed code that they so handily give to you and then copy and paste it into my blog. It’s really cool, you can select what size you want it, and the code they give you automatically makes it a link back to your flickr account, which is perfectly fine with me. That’s what I don’t use my blog uploader, and I actually find that the flickr servers are faster anyway.

Copy and Paste into your favorite blog service!

anyway, that’s how I get my photos from camera to blog. Once I get my new gear in, I’ll show you my new workflow. Here are the pics from my NYE lunch with Jimmy, Beppe, Roger, and Liz (sorry, no pics of Bep’s boy toy).