PHARMACOLOGICAL PROPERTIES 1 Pharmacodynamic properties

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The impact of digital

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W Basic workfl ow: Cataloguing and digital asset managementfl Impact of digital

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X Workflow productsfl

Obsolescence and upgrading

Some colleges and universities have not been able to keep up with the increasing costs and shorter market lives of digital cameras. Some digital camera manufacturers and distributors have run part-exchange deals with professionals in a rolling programme of product replacement.

The pro is credited for the cost of the old camera, gets new kit and the old camera goes to a college.

It is not only the kit on offer today at colleges, but also what plans there are to upgrade it and keep up with the game. For both professional photographers and educational establishments, the additional costs of computing power and software upgrades are also crippling.

Computers share the same two-to-three-year obsolescence cycle; imaging software seems to have an 18-month upgrade cycle. Nor can the cycle of product replacement and computer upgrade be readily broken as buying a new digital camera often means its filesfi can only be conveniently opened with the latest version of a raw processor, which demands the latest processor to run. Camera, computer and software all need upgrading together.

Digital costs need covering as clients are benefiting fi from the conveniences and workflow changes digital fl has brought. In fact, the digital imaging revolution has front-loaded the job workflow and pushed fl

a lot of responsibility for producing finished print-ready fi images on to the photographer. Photographers should never be tempted to solve the issue of digital costs by shooting a pile of images and dumping them on to a CD; letting the client sort them out. It may seem like there is no effort in producing a digital contact sheet as opposed to processing a film for fi contacting, but there are skill and equipment costs involved. These cost implications need carefully explaining and a true and fair charge made for all digital processing.

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A new generation of computer software has been designed to address the needs of the professional photographer. Products such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Apple Aperture take the photographic workflow asfl the starting point for their design. These products are built around powerful Raw processors but stop short of real content editing. However, they could readily form the software basis of a professional photographer’s business without the need for other image-editing or cataloguing products – at least in theory.

Most professionals employ a very personal selection of programs, often not using the full feature set of any one piece of software. They often prefer to mix and match to suit their own workflowfl preferences and photographic style. In the past, many photographers based their professional workfl ow around Adobe Photoshop. Photoshopfl is the industry standard product for image editing – though that is precisely where its strengths lie:

as a layered image editor.

Image browsing

Photoshop only fairly recently was updated with any type of file browser at all, to enable users to fifi find and preview images before editing. The Adobe File Browser feature of old has now been transformed into a fully-fledged asset manager called Adobe Bridge. However, fl

Bridge does not offer cataloguing as we have already seen. The user interface for workflow products such as fl Aperture and Lightroom is centred around a catalogue of images.

Aperture initially held all images in one giant library, but this approach was criticised by users and both it and Lightroom now catalogue files through the fi existing operating system hierarchy. The developers of workflow products recognise the fact that fl

photographers shoot a lot of images and then whittle down the selection to just the best one or two on both technical and artistic grounds.

Workfl ow productsfl

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W Impact of digital Workfl ow productsfl

Getting images into use

Once the handful of good images has been selected – more often than not this is being done on a tethered camera system with the computer in the studio – the Raw fi le processor is put to workfi to enhance and non-destructively edit the images.

The user interface has been designed around the ideas and practices of the photographer, who in all probability is not a computer or image editing specialist.

Some editing features that once required that the filefi be exported to an external editor – thereby degrading image quality – can now be done non-destructively within the workfl ow program. The second generationsfl of both Aperture and Lightroom have seen this kind of development, with effects such as graduated fi lteringfi and local selective adjustments becoming possible.

Getting images into use is the fi nal stage of thefi workfl ow. Aperture and Lightroom have powerful printfl and output capabilities that make it possible to create websites, sophisticated presentations, book projects, fi ne-art prints and make uploads to social networking fi

and gallery sites without diffi culty. Workflfi fl ow products are designed to support third-party plug-ins to extend their functionality and to offer solutions for specificfi professional requirements, such as online portfolio content management or portrait retouching. We are only just at the beginning of the development curve of workfl ow products.fl