Okay, this is not about a trip or anything, although it’s (obviously) related.  This is about my digital photography workflow, what I’ve found that works and what I’ve found that doesn’t.

Why am I doing this?  Primarily, because I went searching for some consumer-level pointers on digital workflows and found ...  well, nothing.

Software Stack:

1. •Apple Aperture 1.1.1 ($299 ... the expensive beast of the bunch)
   

2. •Apple iPhoto 6.0.4 ($79 for the whole iLife 6 suite)
   

3. •Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 ($80 online download)
   

Hardware Stack:

1. •Canon Digital Rebel 300D shooting in RAW
   

2. •Fast 4GB CF card from RiData
   

Why RAW?

RAW is a representation of your camera’s raw image sensor data.  When you shoot in JPEG, the camera starts with that raw data, applies a “white balance” to make whites white instead of blue or yellow (this is harder than it sounds), applies some level of “sharpening” to remove the inherent aliasing from the sensor geometry, then tosses out 75% of the data from the sensor by compressing it in a “lossy” format (the “not noticeable” 75%, but this is a key factor).

This is great for you if the camera picks the right white balance and the proper level of sharpening, and that particular set of settings works across the entire image.  One example of where this completely fails is when taking pictures of inside activity where there is a window and outside activity in the background.  Since the compensation for white balance depends on the color and quality of the light lighting the scene, and sunlight is much different in this respect than either tungsten or fluorescent indoor bulbs, we’ve just put the camera in an impossible situation.  Now, usually, your focus is either indoors or outdoors, and the odd color cast of the peripheral elements isn’t terribly distracting, but, sometimes ...

Sometimes you have to pick a different white balance, and sometimes you want more or less sharpening.  Sometimes your camera’s light sensor got fooled by the bright background and horribly under-developed your focal object.

These are troubling times in your digital darkroom.  You can see the picture right there.  The baby’s smile was priceless, you caught the splash of the water in perfect clarity.  But, it’s too dark, or too bright, or too yellow or too blue.  In these cases, you need to make changes, which going from JPEG means two things:  one more round of data-loosing compression, and shifting the “visible” part of the image into areas the original JPEG compressor thought you didn’t need any more (those shadows or highlights where people hid their faces).

This is why RAW is great.  You skip that first round of compression (and the second too, if you save in TIFF or some other non-lossy format), which means there is no negative effect from the camera’s initial guess at white balance and sharpening.  You also don’t end up “enhancing” the JPEG artifacts (halos around abrupt color changes, for instance) instead of the real picture data (ripples around a skipping rock, for instance).

At the same time, there are problems with RAW:

1. •The files are huge
   

2. •It takes a significant amount of processing to make a usable image from it
   

3. •Since every camera manufacturer has one or more RAW format “standards”, very few products support it and so that tends to make your workflow more complicated.  If RAW were easy, everyone would do it, and the one “perfect” tool would be all we’d need.
   

4. •Some programs, notably iWeb 1.1, don’t handle RAW image files.  In particular, iWeb just silently fails to import a RAW format picture, so if you’ve got a whole album of pictures going to a “Pictures” template, and one or two of those are still “RAW”, you’ll end up with a picture page with one or two fewer pictures.  With any luck, that’ll be fixed in 2.0, but the fact remains that RAW images are nowhere near as universally decipherable as JPEG images.
   

Now, most of the time, for most pictures, those negatives far outweigh the positives.  But, if that was the end of the story then we wouldn’t be here talking about RAW workflows, would we?  It’s all about that perfect picture you just know is in there and just can’t give up trying to bring out.  So, I’ve begun shooting in RAW.  Then, the question becomes:  what do I do with them once I’ve taken all my pictures?

Initial Attempt:  Just use iPhoto

iPhoto handles RAW files.  You can load up your library with RAW files, and they aren’t made into JPEG until you do the first edit.  If you do a bunch of “edits” in the editor, then save it, you’ve only thunked down to JPEG once, resulting in maximum image quality.  You can go back to the original RAW file at any time by choosing “Revert to Original” on the menus.  You can do basic adjustments to levels (what is the brightest white, and the blackest black?), but only basic adjustments.  That’s where the problems start coming in.

Take a picture outside on a bright day.  The face is in shadows and the background is bright.  What you really want to do is tell the computer to regard the “shadows” tones as brighter, while keeping the “black” tones and the “white” tones where they are.  Computers are smart.  They can do that sort of thing, and even provide some level of interpolation between the shades to reduce “banding”.  Instead, iPhoto lets you change “black” and “white”.  That’s it.  So, while it fulfills the checkbox of “imports and edits RAW files”, it doesn’t satisfy any of my real-world reasons for wanting to import and edit such files.

Mission:  failed.

Try 2:  Insert Adobe Camera RAW.

My next attempt at getting a decent RAW workflow was in integrating iPhoto 6 and Photoshop Elements 4.  I would shoot in RAW, then import into iPhoto as I’d always done.  You can open a RAW file from iPhoto into an external application, then do any corrections there.  The problem is that Elements will save to a JPEG file, but iPhoto won’t ever read in the edited file, unless you import it again.  Then, of course, you’ve lost the connection to the RAW file.  You have to do this on every file because of the limitations I listed above (silent iWeb failure).  So, basically, why even put it in iPhoto from the start?

Turns out there’s a workaround:  import the RAW in iPhoto; open for edit in Adobe Camera Raw; open for edit in iPhoto, change something, then save (this tells iPhoto that the current version is a JPEG, not the RAW); save changes from Adobe as the JPEG in the “Modified” folder (so, from “Originals/2006/Cheetos/MyPic.CRW” to “Modified/2006/Cheetos/MyPic.JPG”); flip back over to iPhoto and the image should automagically update to reflect your changes.  But, that’s both tedious and error-prone.

And, levels?  Well, the adjustment tools in the Camera RAW tool are better than in iPhoto, but not great.  Fortunately, I could get the “bring the face out of the shadows” effect using Photoshop, without loosing too much detail (because this is Photoshop Elements instead of the full Photoshop CS2 package, you lose a bit of color fidelity going from Camera Raw to Photoshop, but nowhere near as much as compressing JPEG.  I’m not ready to plunk down Photoshop cash for my hobby, though!)

Verdict:  Clunky program interaction.

Try 3:  Direct to Adobe

The third attempt was to just copy the files over into the file system, bring the “keepers” up in Adobe Photoshop Elements, save those off to JPEG, then import the results into iPhoto.

This avoided the abortive original RAW roll in iPhoto, but also made it a lot harder to pick from multiple takes and to give a quick after-the-event preview slideshow of the pictures.  Those are deal-killers for me.  Remember, I’m a consumer-level guy, not a pro-level guy.  The wife and kids have gotten spoiled with not having to wait a week or two to see the pictures, and with having fancy, polished slideshows right from the start.  Until the file system method can do that, this is just not a valid option.

Result:  Missing key day-of features.

Try 4:  Aperture as initial capture/edit

The third attempt here was to import directly into Aperture, do my comparisons and edits there, then export the final product as JPEG into a folder which then gets pulled into iPhoto.

Aperture as a photo slush pile is great.  The stacks concept works wonders.  The RAW editing tools (most noticably the Levels panel with quarter-tone adjustments) are exactly what I need.  And, it does a nice job of slideshows (not as nice as iPhoto, but still nice enough).

Nirvana, sort of.

The missing aspects here are keywording and preservation of the original RAW.  The blame for these two issues rests on both Aperture (which doesn’t export a RAW+XMP format file)  and iPhoto (which doesn’t import embedded keywords and wouldn’t know what to do with a RAW+XMP file if it got one).

So, I’m not quite there yet, but I’ve gotten a reasonably smooth workflow going right now.  Until iPhoto 7 comes out with potential improvements in one of the alternative workflows (or this one), I think I’ve found my groove.

Here’s my basic workflow:

2.  Shoot lots of pictures.  I have a big and fast card (although writing isn’t much faster than on a slower card because of the Canon’s old circuitry bottlenecks; this would be a leading factor in getting a new body).

3.  Import into Aperture.  I’m using a USB2 card reader.  Much faster than reading from the camera.

4.  Go through in a couple of passes, first grouping “stacks” of images (same shot, different settings) and rejecting the out-of-focus and just plain lousy pics, then providing a rough rating system while enhancing the photos, then running through to get just the “best” photos for permanent storage.  If I have to do any “fancy” edits (ie, adjusting one part of the image while not affecting the rest), then I open in Adobe, save back over to Aperture, and continue on.

5.  Cull mercilessly.  Honestly, we don’t need 250 pictures of Sophia opening a present.  One picture needs to be deemed the moment-capture, and at most three or four auxiliary pictures for the hand full of times you’ll want to really stroll down memory lane.  This being digital and bits being cheap, that means five or ten pictures get kept and for the most part nine of them never looked at again.  250, though, would just be silly.

6.  Export the “keepers” to JPEG.  Import them all into iPhoto.  I’ve got a nice little 2-minute Automator script to do that.

7.  Keep the “best” RAW files in Aperture in case we want to revisit them later, and trash the rest.  Hey, it’s no worse than trashing all that RAW data inside the camera!

That’s it, for now.  Of course, this will all likely be obsolete six months down the road.