Workflow

Fox
(Canon 350D F6 @ 1/500sec: Sigma 50 – 500mm zoom lens) 

Whatever, type of digital camera you own and no matter what type of images you photograph, those images must ultimately be processed through a series of software applications that get them to there intended audience, whether that be on paper or online.  

For the majority of people the process know as ‘Workflow’ is a simple and painless process, you connect the camera to the computer with the lead supplied switch on the camera and the images are transferred to the computer and that’s the end of the work, you just select the pictures you want print them off and send a picture of little Johnny to Grandma, who delights in the fact you have remembered her.  

For others the process is a little more complicated, many of us will have hundreds if not thousands (at the last count, I had a little over 20,000 images taken in the last 5 years). We need to catalogue these where we can easily find them again.  

Once we have down loaded the images we must go through each one and delete the ones we don’t want, the out of focus or the ones where we have managed to photo our own thumb.  

For the more advanced we next move on to editing, enhancing our pictures has never been easier and there are many software programs that we can use. Photoshop is the best on the market but at over £500 for a copy is well out of our price range unless you are professional. However, Adobe do make an abridged version, Photoshop Elements at under a £100 pounds it will do everything that the  most people need, there are of course others on the market priced about the same  that do the same job. Corel Paintshop Pro to name one.  

I have a copy of Photoshop and I have a few that I have down loaded from the web for free, these are good for simple fixes and are perfectly adequate and I do use them, two that you should try are Gimp and Photoscape, both are really very good.   

So we have editing our pictures what’s next on the agenda. This will be discussed in the next post.