Editing/Post Processing
This page discusses the editing and post processing methods I use to improve the photographs and put them on the web.
All of the photographs are recorded by my cameras as jpegs on SD/SDHC cards. I haven’t gone the RAW route because of the sheer number of images that I take and the amount of processing time it takes once I get them on my computer. I process them on an Apple computer (a 3 GHz MacPro with a Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor and 9GB of RAM and MacOS 10.6.3) primarily with Apple Aperture (V3.03). If I have to do any alterations to it, which I rarely do, I may use Acorn, LightZone, or Pixelmator, or a combination of the three. My workflow is as follows:
- The major event for an image set is, for example, the Egypt trip, so I create a folder (directory) called "Egypt" and copy all of the contents of the HD cards into it. Each card has a separate name which results in a separate folder inside "Egypt."
- I then synchronize all of the files copied from the SD cards onto a separate external hard drives. These are my original backups.
- I next rename all of the files with the date embedded in Exif fields in the image file. I use Aperture or ExifRenamer for this. Both are easy to use and reliable. It provides a unique file name so that the original can always be found on my hard drive(s).
- I backup the renamed set on another external hard drive. I thus have two backups of my original images.
- I create a new Aperture library and import all renamed image files into it.
- I examine each image and:
- Rate it from one star to five stars (optional)
- Fix it - color balance and intensity, crop, straightening, touchup, etc. whatever is needed.
- Save it in a named folder (optional)
- Rate each image (optional)
- Assign it keywords (optional)
- Process face recognition (optional)
- Extract a subset for a video/slide show (optional)
- I back up the library on another drive.
- I export images from Aperture for other use typically in a 1024x1024 envelope.
- The websites I create are developed with Coda.
- Because I'm still learning CSS I use CSSEdit to retrieve style sheets from websites that I like. I learn from them how to taylor things to my needs/desires.
- The individual photo galleries were created with Jalbum . This application has lots of different templates with which to display the photos in galleries. I like Chameleon-Aqua_dark.
- The images in the galleries are in a 800x600 size envelope so that they would fot on most monitors or laptops.
- I develop the website on my personal machine which I have set up as a local web server using MAMP
- When satisfied with the looks and performance of the website I upload it to the ‘real’ server using FETCH.
- My website is hosted, very inexpensively, by SiteGround. . They had some great sales on hosting plans not too long ago.
