even at the same print resolution, for instance, an ink-jet print on gloss paper can show more detail than one produced on fine-art paper. To get the best fi results each file must be sharpened appropriately.fi
‘Files destined for different
outputs need to be sharpened
in different ways.’
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As much of a professional photographer’s future income will come from legacy images, it makes sense to take good care of all images, to archive them and to catalogue them in a form that allows easy retrieval. Lets look first at how imagesfi can be stored. Photographers shooting filmfi will need to use conservation quality materials and archival storage for their negatives and transparencies. There was a time that stock libraries would only consider film images capturedfi on Kodachrome as this was considered the only transparency material with any claim to being stable over a long period of time.
Colour slides made using E6 chemistry were not considered – for a long time – to be suitable for long-term storage, although modern film andfi processing has improved longevity considerably.
Today, most film photographers would immediately fi scan their film originals, putting the originalfi
negatives and slides into safe long-term storage and deal only with the digital scan.
Online storage
So how do you store digital material? You need to protect against loss of data and loss of access to the media on which it is stored. Unlike a scratched negative, which can be repaired or retouched, digital data once ‘damaged’ is lost forever. The only thing is to keep plenty of copies of digital files in more fi than one location.
Online storage is becoming a popular solution – this puts your files in storage on remote servers. The only fi real risk to the images is the financial stability of the fi companies offering these services. Any photographer entering a contract would be wise to look at the insurance values for lost material and the possibility of compensation claims.
DVDs and CDs
The generally accepted ‘archival’ storage solution has been DVDs or CDs, with the major recommendation that read-only disks are used and that CD-R, CD-RW and all re-writeable DVD formats are not suitable for long-term storage.
Although it was heralded as a storage medium for the very long term, the CD has not proved to have anything like an archival life-span (with the exception of some of the archival quality ‘gold’ disks). None of the magneto-optical and removable hard-drive systems popular in the 1980s have survived. This is a warning to the photographer of the need to keep copying their digital material on to the latest ‘archival’
media to avoid technological obsolescence.
Basic workfl ow: Archivingfl
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X Basic workfl ow: Cataloguing and digital asset managementfl
File retention
You need to retain versions of the same image from various stages of the workflow. Original fl camera files, any fifi file that has been edited and final outputfi fi les. At each stage consider fi
how much work you would have to do to recreate any filefi you consider throwing away.
pre-shoot planning
output files fi .tiff or .pdf
layered workfi lesfi .psd camera fi lesfi .jpg, .tiff, raw
camera filesfi .dng, Raw capture
process
archiving and cataloguing optimise for output transfer
editing
Hard drives
External hard drives were once not considered
suffi ciently reliable for long-term storage, but technology fi has improved and many photographers now use hard drives for online access to archival material. What tends to make hard drives obsolete is the connection – while SCSI was once the main computer connector, it is now diffi cult to retrieve data from a SCSI hard drive. fi Again, you have to keep copying your files on to the fi latest media to avoid the trap of obsolescence.
What do you store?
Camera filesfi – as Raw or converted DNG Make sure XMP sidecar files fi are kept as they retain all the Camera Raw settings Edited fi lesfi – as Photoshop documents PSD
Keep full layer, mask and comp information Output files fi – as TIFFs or PDFs
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Cataloguing has already been mentioned in the context of editing and selection. Many photographers will use cataloguing software or digital asset management (DAM) software to ‘see’ their files through the whole process.fi
While it was once a fairly easy task to hold a negative file sheet up to the light and identify the individual fi
images, this is clearly impossible with digital files.fi The file name may be limited by the computerfi operating system and it may not be possible to give images meaningful names such as ‘Kathy and Alan’s Wedding 2009 – bride and groom leaving after service’. You have no chance remembering that this is what image _DSC0345.NEF actually contains.
A small copy of the image – a thumbnail or preview image – has to be available to identify the image.
Albums
One of the key ideas behind an album or collection of digital files is that the fifi file does not physically have to reside in two places to appear in two albums. Pointers can be set so a picture of your grandmother and her dog can appear in a family album, an album of dog images and one featuring senior citizens. Each album will point back to the original file. How you catalogue depends fi on your need to retrieve images.
In the long term, it becomes vital to create accessible catalogues of legacy files that are keyword indexed fi and cross-referenced. Specific images can then fi be identified and retrieved from wherever they fi have been archived, for the images may not be stored online and accessible at all. They may be stored on CD or DVD or on another server or external hard drive that requires mounting. There is money to be made from legacy files, but the photographer must be able fi to retrieve them economically to make handling old images financially viable.fi
Basic workfl ow: Cataloguingfl and digital asset management
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X Impact of digital
Digital asset management (DAM)
Digital asset management software handles more than image fi les and can produce catalogues of audiofi and video fi les, as well as illustration fifi fi les in bitmap and vector forms, and also most document and page layout fi le formats. Some photographers simply suppressfi these cataloguing fi lters to use a digital asset managerfi as an image database. Leaders in the field of DAMsfi include Extensis Portfolio, Canto Cumulus, Microsoft Expressions Media (which was once iView MediaPro) and ACDSee. You may need to become familiar with the general ideas of indexing, key-wording and cataloguing, as you may be expected to use one or more of these programs depending on your place of work.
Although it was developed from the File Browsing feature of Adobe Photoshop version 6.0, you can forget Adobe Bridge for cataloguing, as it is a cache not a database. It rapidly became the management application for Adobe’s Creative Suite of illustration, design, page and web layout products and shows the current state of play on your hard drives and mounted disks – it does not keep track of off-line images as does true cataloguing software.