Workflow is yours costing cash????

Workflow - Avoiding meltdown!

At seminars for the past months both authors have been discussing workflow and noting a prevalence of people who are struggling to keep up with their wedding post production when using digital capture. Typical complaints are that Saturday's wedding is not ready for print until the following Thursday and some people report they are 8 weddings behind. The issue is therefore quite serious to social and wedding photographers.

There are a number of myths surrounding workflow and so we sat down with a stopwatch and actually timed the various parts of the workflow. So please do not write in saying you do it faster or slower or that you bought kit like ours and it is slower - we are telling you how we found it on our machines which are typical of those in many studios, a couple of years old with reasonable specs. For the record they are The major components of the workflow are shown in the diagram. These will vary slightly but are based on Tom's and assume 200 digital exposures headed for a designed album of 50 pages (double sided) printed by bureau. This gives a 50 page album consisting of 25 double page spreads each 24in by 16in. Tom's workflow is very slick, those who have attended his seminars will confirm. All the major operations are controlled by keyboard hot keys or actions, frames are made with Extensis photo frame, each page is individually designed. Previewing to the client is done on a digital data projector via a Picturestoexe screen show. Some of the operations require the photographer to be in full time attendance e.g. page make up. Others allow him to go for a cup of tea or get on with their VAT return. However, in general it is a risky business to continue operating your PC whilst it is say printing in the backgrounds or writing a DVD. If you run out of buffer your process could stall with variable but often bad consequences.

Eating Humble Pie

The humble pie chart is the best way to show the relative portions of time on various tasks. Hopefully it is self-explanatory but the issues and options for each sector are discussed below.

Down Load and Archive Images

Tom's 200 images take 60 min to down load from card to hard drive. Mike's was better than this. His new (£7 well spent) built in card reader, attached directly to the motherboard did the job in 13 minutes (down from 35 minutes on an older USB external card slot). Mike's was for a new 1GB 40x speed Compact Flash. His older 12x card took twice as long. Tom's cards are a mixture but that is the reality for many people.

Archiving the files from the hard drive to CD, remote hard drive or a networked drive will be very equipment dependant. In total 200 files each of 20MB will fit onto a DVD requiring about 35minutes at 2x write speed. Alternatively you could write to 5 CD's. Mike's 52x CD took 2m30s to write 38 images followed by another 45 seconds to caption the disc and box it. So it takes about 16 minutes to write the CD's and box then up. However best practice demands that you make two CD sets and take one of them home to prevent total loss in the vent of robbery etc so we allocated 30 minutes to this process.

In total, download and archiving takes Tom around 80 minutes, as he makes a DVD and backs up to a networked Hard Drive. Variants of the process are possible and the predicted times range from 30 minutes to 1½ h.

Grading Images workflow

The time spent grading the images for colour balance and exposure (only - no manipulation yet) varies with workflow and operator skill .We examined a couple of possibilities. Using a Canon EOS D1s with a 30MB TIFF Raw file we took 73 minutes just to batch process the files. This was almost exactly the same time as using Photoshop RAW file handler followed by Russell Brown's script to automatically prepare the files as corrected TIIFS in a new folder.

Tom completed his operation in 70 minutes, batch-correcting groups of images shot under the same lighting conditions. Some of the benefit was derived from his smaller (20MB) files from the Fuji S2 Pro.

Making a Preview

Tom views each image weeding out rejects, making sepia images, monochrome images and applying a variety of edge effects using hot keys and Photo Frame. He completed his task in 2 hours plus 5 minutes to make a preview CD using "pictures to exe" followed by 20 minutes watching the actual show right the way through.

The preview build thus takes about 2 1/2 h with little scope for shortening the time without reducing the effort spent in getting things right. You owe it to yourself and your client to keep up your standards at this stage! Tom's keyboard shortcuts are just about as slick as you can get and the time spent developing them is repaid many times over.

Tom lees Workflow

Album Building Workflow

After the client has viewed the selection of images and chosen the candidates (and we have not allocated time for this by the way!) Tom starts the page build. He makes each one up individually and devotes about 4 hours on average to make a 50 page album. This time could be shortened by using a package such as Spicer's Montage, Campdale's ProAlbum or Bellwood's Album Page Templates - at the cost of individuality. Doing so might save you about 2h on the timing shown.

At the other end of the scale David Simm from the USA averages higher times but in fairness he works mainly in the upper end of the market! Here is how he replied

"I have just finished composing 120 images into fifty pages and with interruptions (scores of 'em) it took me just two and a half working days to compose, the files for that album will be sent to Graphi for production. The significant thing here is the number of times production stops for the interruptions.

Workflow A "normal" forty side album with seventy images takes on average one and a half days, the exceptions are days when I have a creativity drain and/or and equipment/software breakdown. The sample album I made from the UK wedding shot in August took me over a week but that is huge, over two hundred pictures across something like sixty-five pages."

These sorts of timings were confirmed by some other wedding photographers we spoke to - Dave Simm is not alone in being slower. At the other end of the scale Gary Galt's studio are much faster - see below.

It is in album-building where the greatest benefits of experience will count most and the acceleration as you make more pages will be greatest. In teaching Photoshop, Mike finds that for his students, 10-fold improvements are quite common, so if your first album takes a whole week do not give up, you are right in the middle of the pack!

On the horizon is the new Epson Album Maker, launched at Photokina. This is a drag and drop template utility which also plugs into Photoshop. It is also able to make slide shows with music and high work load job lists and data saving. We will report in due course when we have had a look at it. At Photokina it was priced at 500 Euros in the press release. It should be released in UK by the time you read this.

Printing

Once the client has agreed the page layouts, their last opportunity to change things, you have to decide on your printing route. Printing may be done via a bureau such as Graphi Studios, Spicer Hallfield Montage Laboratory. Tom mainly uses GraphiStudio and his involvement consists only of phoning for a courier, checking the PDF proofs and placing the final go ahead. For Montage we spoke to Ian Galt of Gallery Studios, Warrington. His brother Gary and himself are extensive users of Montage and can now make up a 40-page album in 20 minutes. This then takes 20 minutes to download over their Broad Band connection followed by 20 minutes to overlay the returned prints and another 15 minutes to build an Art Leather Album. Gallery Studios have increased their average album sale from 24 pages (50 x 10x8) to 36 with many people opting for 40 pages by using the Montage system. This, of course, is attended by a proportionally increased profit on each wedding!

It is when the photographer decides to print in house that things start to get more variable in terms of timings. Printing will most probably be performed on an Epson 7600, 4000 or 2100 or possibly an R800.

The time to print a sheet on an inkjet depends partly upon the system the image is being spooled from and partly on the printer image processing. A parallel port is hopelessly slow and so the first requirement is USB or Firewire. Our 7600 took 6 minutes to print an A3 spread, the 4000 is quicker (4m30s). A 2100 is by comparison very slow taking around 30 minutes to complete the same task. Tom Lee reckons about 200 minutes if he were to print from his Epson 4000 using the Ilford Studio RIP, crucially this would give him his work station back just as soon as the file has been sent across the network. Working up these page speeds to our example album gives timings of 120min for the 4000, 150min for the 7600 and a whopping 750 min for the 2100.The timings for printing seem to be a law unto themselves so please do not email to tell us you do it faster or slower! One thing we find in general is that the timings on manufacturers spec sheets are a little optimistic.

In house printing is always going to be the largest or one of the largest slices in the pie chart. The 2100 is essentially out of the game unless you are an occasional wedding shooter, just starting out and/or have some time on your hands. Regardless of your in house printing method you need some kind of automatic feed (either roll paper or sheet feed), which allows you to leave the printer unattended; (gloss sheets tend to stick together and mis-load, fine art papers are too thick and should be hand-loaded anyway). Once your system has started to print you are unlikely to get much sense out of it if you try and carry on working. It will either be too slow or at worst you will stall the printing process all together. This is mainly why RIPs are such a good investment; they are invariably served by a separate computer and tick away in the background once the images have been sent over the network. With 1GB network switches this can take little more than a few minutes. If you have to make up a print order for an album, which contains a variety of sizes, the nesting function of a RIP or a standalone such as Qimage or Epson PagePlanner will be useful in conjunction with a roll feed.

Conclusion

The length of time it takes on postproduction brings into sharp focus the issue of charging for your labours.The bottom line is that you are staring down the barrel of 9 hours of work, nearer to 12 hours in reality, as you never get a clean run at things. At £10 per hour that is £120 but how much do you pay your garage mechanic? A nearer figure is £17/hr, which bumps postproduction up to about £200. However you have yet to add overheads and materials so the real value of your work is closer to £300.You can push the figures around all day but even disregarding the financial aspects, if you somehow manage a wedding on Friday, Saturday and Sunday you suddenly need 36 hours of post production in the following week, having already worked your weekend! The moral is obvious, you have to charge realistically and fully for your work and you owe it to yourself to work hard on building the shortcuts which make life easier - in other words don't put up with your slow card down loader, spend the £7 McNamee did and speed it up almost 3-fold!

Top Tips for a Painless Workflow

Getting it right in the camera is still the best starting point. If you leave in the fire extinguisher you are going to have to open the shot separately, remove it and save it back. This interrupts your workflow - don't do it! Every unnecessary shot that you take will have to be downloaded, renamed archived and stored just in case you need it. Few of us are willing to delete files but they add to processing time.

TIP 1 Get to know your camera exposure system. Do not rely on Programme mode it rarely produces the optimum, exposure. Use an incident light meter or a grey card or your histogram or even better all three. In Photoshop a correctly exposed grey card should have RGB values of between 117 and 125 and they should all be the same.

TIP 2 Synchronise the clocks of your cameras if you use more than one. Then you can sort in chronological order later ahead of renaming your files to show your client.

TIP 3 Familiarise yourself with auto numbering on your camera. You can also use a different file naming for each camera so they you can look for consistent errors or faults in exposure colour balance etc.

TIP 4 If you use compact flash cards of 640MB capacity, each will archive onto one CD when you back up your files. Delkin make 640 cards and are, as far as we know, the only people to do so.

TIP 5 Think about data security if you use a large (e.g. 4GB) card. Lose that card and you lose the whole wedding. In engineering terms you build in more redundancy to your workflow by using 500-640MB cards each representing about a film in old money, less if you shot with a larger chip camera.

TIP 6 If you have to use Auto Levels (or any of its variants) make an Action to create an Adjustment Layer. The review a bunch of images tiled on screen together and any goofy ones will stand out. All you need do then is open the Layers Palette double click the Adjustment layer and correct that file. This disobeys the rule of getting it bang on first time but is an efficient way of getting most of your files close with a fall back position.

TIP 7 If Auto levelling produces barren highlights without any ink on them, double click the eyedropper for the highlight and set the value to 250RGB points. This is force the ink jet to put a very small amount of ink down removing the barren patches. You can do the same thing with your shadows to set your maximum black at a level that will differentiate detail.

TIP 8 Try always to make a Source and Destination Folder on your desktop and COPY files into the source when using actions. Also make the action send the processed file to the Destination Folder. Following this protocol means that if you goof on your making up the Action and it writes back the file you do not lose your original. Also all actions will by default use these two folders, it's an extra simplification to your workflow.

TIP 9 As soon as you have the data secured and archived, format all your Compact Flash cards. At your next wedding you then KNOW that a card with images on is one you have shot that day. Number each card and have a slot in your storage wallet, identically numbered; at the shoot, turn the used cards over when you put them back so you can see where you are up to

Part 2

The SWPP 2008 Convention was an outstanding success,
we have 193 days to get ready for the 2009 convention - which starts on January 14, 2009

Photo Quote: I don't like to work with assistants. I'm already one too many the camera alone would be enough. - Alfred Eisenstaedt