Blayke turns one next week. We did a photoshoot.



It's come up a couple times recently, so I just thought I'd mention my (fairly minimalist) photo workflow:

• Shoot (raw).
• Upload.
• Use the Adobe dng converter to convert .nef (Nikon raw) to .dng.
• Open the dngs in the Photoshop digital negative viewer.
• Sort the wheat from the chaff, adjust exposure, temperature, and saturation.
• Save the good stuff as jpgs, or tif if it's a print.
• Maybe do some work on them in Photoshop proper, e.g. airbrushing and vignetting.

I'm not sure how it compares to Lightroom and Picasa and such, but the dng viewer is a pretty good way to browse an image set. Thumbnails on the left, image in the center, and just the right amount of darkroom-style toolery. Adjustments can be made to group-selected images, since lighting conditions tend to be similar.


Not that proper exposure is unimportant, but sometimes you've zip tie a camera to the back of a motorcycle and let the matrix metering go to town. So there can be over- or underexposure.


Not to worry; raw captures light range beyond the standard histogram bounds. But you have to make sure your editor hasn't already truncated those sections of the histo.


But yeah, most editing can be taken care of right there in the viewer.