Tons of photos/where to start/thanks for all the help

[buleetu]

hi everyone

my gf and i got back from sharm el sheikh yesterday, we had a wonderful holiday, hotel wasnt the best but the beaches and the reefs were amazing its our third time there but this time was the best,
as well as all the usuall reef fish and coral we also got to experiance being within a few feet of a big green turtle and a red octopus that was either mating or eating another octopus while changing colors from red to white to black and white stripes hahaha amazing or what

i have a ton of photos to sort out now raw and j peg, but i dont know where to start???!!???

where do u guys start off when ur doing ur computer work?

i have photoshop 7, raw therapee and the freeware s7raw to work with

also i would like to thank all of u who helped me out with ur replies when i was buying my camera and housing and also answering all those basic questions about uw photography and raw shooting etc.. i got the e900 and ike housing and it was the best thing i ever bought,

ill post some photos as soon as i can but heres one

thanks again guys

 

[mikerault]

I usually look through them all and sort out what I feel are the best unprocessed images. From the best unporcessed I start at the top and begin with the usual suspects: Crop, Levels, contrast and color (adding back in selected bits of red/yellow). Once you have everything "the way you remember it" with proper levels, contrast and color, then do sharpening using either the sharpen or unsharp mask tools.

That's about it!

Mike

 

[Larry C]

I generally start in the RAW conversion program. I process the white balance and contrast on the good shots and mark the out of focus and "oops, the subject left before the camera clicked" pictures for discard. Once I'm done with the white balance, light level and contrast, I transfer them to a file by dive location and date. Then I do each dive as a group, taking the best ones to Photoshop and doing whatever backscatter removal, sharpening and color adjustment they need to be their best. The ones I really like, I shrink to 600X800 and put in my Photobucket page, then post the 2 or 3 best ones here.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I just went thru the process of sorting about 2,500 images down to 125 after three weeks in Indonesia. My starting point was to go thru each day's pictures with the question ... "six months from now will I be interested in looking at this picture again?"

If the answer was no, it went bye-bye.

That got rid of most of 'em before I ever even considered editing ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Papa_Bear]

All good advice! My work-flow is similar and in addition I leave the file numbers in place in order to keep the images place..... That way you can match them to a log or dive site schedule easier and it keeps the original order! You also might look at a program called Lightroom from Adobe, it helps things move faster and with organization! Good luck

 

[ce4jesus]

Man this could be a pinned topic in a day or two. I'm a hopeless pack rat, both in life and with digital photos. I start by backing every photo up to a couple of DVDs so I have the originals should something happen. I then go through RAW processing and grade them out while adjusting them. Finally, I catagorize them by location, fish type and date. Since I don't dive but a few times a year, I generally don't delete many because hard disk space is cheap and I can practice my photoshop skills on the ones that aren't so good...haha.

cheers,
Gary

 

[stu_in_fl]

i use Lightroom which makes my workflow reasonably painless (but still does take a while) - it seems similar to the people above:

- go through the initial pick/reject process where rejects are just crappy shots without any hope and picks are either pretty good, show something interesting or have the possibility of fixing.
- go through the next stage of edits and give them all a rating of 1-5 stars and adding keywords to identify
- go through the best of them (4 or 5 stars) and put the final edits in place - if i have 10 photos of the same thing i compare and only 1 or 2 will retain the top ratings, i reduce the ratings of the not so good.
...hopefully by then i have a managable number
- only the really bad ones (no hope of any fixing, or crap, boring, out of focus subjects) will get deleted as you never know how your photo-processing skills will improve over time !

I then make backups in various places - my computer, other laptop, external hard drive, then once a year another copy delivered back to the UK ! Backups include the originals and the edited versions (exported from Lightroon)

e.g. last trip I took 1500 photos....500 or so were deleted straight off the bat - of the remaining 500 were pretty average ( but kept) and 500 were pretty good - of that 500, I got down to 100 I really liked.

 

[buleetu]

thanks everyone, i dont think i have 100 good ones, maybe 20 great and 40 good 200 or so brutal haha, it was cool to finally get some pictures that dont have visible pixels in them when i look at them on the computer screen,i was trying all the different settings on the camera all the time,i found my self getting fed up with raw a lot though because a lot of the pictures turned out out of focus,raw pics need sharpening most of the time though dont they???

ill get to work right away and im sure ill have one or 2 to put in the album on here

thanks again

 

[mikerault]

RAW will always need leveling though I don't think they should need sharpening. I usually work with the JPEG and leave the RAW as a fallback if I can't get what I want from the JPEG (my camera stores both.)

 

[ce4jesus]

Your RAW photos shouldn't be any different than the Jpeg when viewing it. The only difference is you have all the information stored in the RAW photo so no processing has been done on it. Now it could be that your camera is automatically sharpening your jpegs if you have it set up that way. RAW is great for being able to white balance a photo where the strobe might not have fired and it is also excellent for being able to adjust exposure up or down a stop or two.