This time by Kong Weng while I was batch processing about 150+ photos and assembling the 'Our Big Day' Slide show. I look more relaxed now since at this moment the photo was taken, the slide show was almost completed.

Image workflow... 2015 RAW images. 24 Gigabytes (including the JPEGs).

1. Tag, tag and tag images for post-processing
Images are tagged with stars (1-5) and color tags (yellow, blue, red, etc) for various purposes - PhotoBook, bulk printing, etc. First cut invariably always ends up with about 20% of the photos selected. Subsequent passes will reduce PhotoBook selection to about 60 photos.

2. Adjust white-balance, tonality, exposure and color
Photos are grouped together according to physical location (i.e. dining room, hallway, ballroom sections) to ease correction of white balance. Color, tonal curves and exposure are also tweaked. Occasional photos may require individual adjustment, others, group adjustments are made.

3. Post-Process!
For PhotoBook images, they are individually hand-processed, tweaked, adjusted, cropped and have full works from tonal adjustments to special effects done on them. They retain full resolution. Bulk printing photos are batched processed, reduced to 4 Mega-pixels for printing up to 8R (8" x 5.33") with few exceptions. All images are post-processed to ProPhoto color space and 16-bit before reduction to 8-bit sRGB images. Bulk images are saved as Quality-12 JPEGs. PhotoBook images are saved in Photoshop PSD format.

4. RJT PhotoBook Layout and styling
RJT PhotoBooks layouts are done in sRGB 16-bit for quality and flexibility. Once completed, the final pages are output as 8-bit sRGB TIFF images for printing on a Gretag LightJet Digital printer.

5. Bulk printing & PhotoBook printing
Off they go!

Well, it's kind of strange that for the first time, I'm sitting down at my PC, going through photos on Bridge, Working it over with Photoshop and compiling a PhotoBook. Nothing out of the ordinary that you can tell except that the photos are all mine. Not mine as in photographed by me, but all the photos are all about me and my precious darling. Just feels slightly odd though.

Perfecting the shot in Photoshop. Start with a RAW capture, Canon EOS-20D, EF16-35mm lens. The shot on the left is the unaltered RAW capture straight from the camera. Processing steps:
- RAW Conversion in Photoshop CS (slight curve adjust and WB), ProPhoto, 16bit
- Tonal Curve shifted and tweaked for shadow and highlight
- Levels and saturation boost to all channels from 125%-133%
- Adjustment layers with soft-light, screen, multiply
- Mask out areas of adjustment layers
- Flatten, smart sharpen
- Convert to sRGB, 8-bit

Well, maybe not a problem in itself but more like the fact that we all like super saturated, high-fidelity color images that by default, most Digital SLRs don't output that kind of result. What does one do? The easy answer is do it in post! (post-processing that is) Obviously much easier when the photo is shot in RAW mode.

The photo below illustrates. Although I did not have the original RAW image, I had the full-sized JPEG and all processing was mostly curves, saturation and the channel mixer.

RAW, RAW, RAW. A lot of people harp on it. A lot of people don't know how to use it but more people use it for the wrong reasons. It's not a miracle file format, nor will it save that horribly over-exposed photo or fix that camera shake for you. The main benefits I see are exposure latitude and color-balance. After shooting 2400 frames in a wedding, you do want the photos of the solemnization ceremony at church or the toast at the ballroom to have the same color and look. No out of whack color balance here. Now, most people know that you can use Photoshop's levels (in separate RGB channel mode of couse) or white-point tool to fix the color balance but the key here is consistency. Uncle George is looking a bit pasty in one frame and in another frame, he looks like he's spent the last two weeks in the Bahamas or something. With RAW, you dial in the color temperature you feel it's right and it's all done right. I'll go preach about exposure latitude on another day. I have two dozen out-of-whack JPEG's to color-match. (Oh yeah, thank God for Photoshop's color-match...)