Workflow

Worldwide KAP Week 2009 was a big success for me. I had all manner of plans for places to fly and things to do, but I only managed to visit a small percentage of the sites on my list. I even caught a cold in the middle of WWKW and lost half the available days to it. Nonetheless I came home with a number of images I'm quite happy with, so I call it an unqualified success.

Last year Peter Neville very kindly offered to edit a book of WWKW images, and so the participants were later able to order a copy and have something to show to their friends, family, and people curious about KAP. No one came forward this year to edit the book, so I did. It's been a whirlwind learning experience, but a good one. And once the images start coming in the learning experience will only ramp up. But so will the fun! So it's all good.

The best part of this is that it's forced me to re-examine my own workflow. I found some flaws in what I've been doing in the past, so here's an opportunity to set the record straight:

The Camera

At the moment I'm still shooting JPG files. I know, I know, RAW is better in oh so many ways. But with the Canon compact cameras, I'm not convinced the benefits are all that huge. The biggest one, for me, is that the images don't have JPG compression artifacts in them. This allows a lot more latitude in image processing, but at a cost: the files are huge. On the ground this isn't a huge problem, but in the air it's difficult to know when your chip is full and to know when to swap chips. The result can be lost images. At some point I might make this change, but not now.

The Computer

As soon as I come home from a session, all images from all chips are dumped to my computer and erased off the chips. At this point I pop out all my batteries and load them into chargers. By the time I make a first pass at the images, my batteries are charged, my chips are all empty, and my bag is re-packed and ready to go again.

Original images are kept pristine. I don't like to make changes I can't un-do. Regardless of whether this is done in software, such as with Adobe Lightroom, or if it's done manually through a system of copying and saving that preserves the original file, this is important.

Once the images are on my computer I sit down with my KAP notebook and start going through the pictures. Clear winners are noted by image number and subject name. Sets of images that might work well as a composite stitch are noted as well, along with the subject name. I don't erase bad shots or non-keepers. These can still be used later in the process.

At this point I'll go back through the composite sets and look for signs of parallax shift. Tall thin things are the toughest since they tolerate almost no camera shfit. But if anything is obviously off, that set is either modified or scrapped. As each one clears this Mark I Eyeball check, I'll load it into my pano stitching software and give it a go. All panos are saved without cropping, full size and checked for anomalies. Sometimes these can be fixed in Photoshop. Sometimes they're too extensive and have to be scrapped. Scrapped composites get a line through them in my notebook.

The next step is to load the images into Photoshop one by one. I like to start with the composites because they're the trickiest to work with. That leaves the single frame images for the end, which is pure pleasure. No stitching anomalies to worry about, just straight darkroom editing.

Most of the time with the composites is spent with the rubber stamp tool, trying to repair anomalies. I'm fairly conservative about this, and will scrap a composite rather than edit out a bunch of anomalies. If I can tell it's been re-worked, so can anyone else. But this is why I don't crop first. If you can rubber stamp areas that are going to be cropped out later, it's a lot less obvious to the viewer later. Waste not.

Once the composites are repaired and cropped, I'll save them without further editing. At this point they're essentially a single frame image and can be treated that way.

Single frame images start by getting geometric corrections. PTLens is great for this. It will take out barrel or pincushion distortion, and can apply the geometric effects of the tilts and shifts available on a view camera. If an image has a strong horizontal or vertical, this can be an essential step in the process. Curved horizons just plain aren't believable to me unless the picture was taken from the stratosphere or from orbit.

Composites with curved horizons or tilted verticals typically go back to the stitching software for repair. Most have the ability to re-tune the projection of the image and take out things like curved horizons. If a composite needs repair of this sort I'll re-stitch it, tweak the projection, and once again save full size without cropping.

Back in Photoshop, the next step is to crop the image for composition. With a camera on a tripod, the photographer has a great deal of say in how the image is composed. With a camera on a KAP rig, even one with video feedback, there's a random element involved. The camera is never pointed quite the way you want, so the resulting images almost always need some form of cropping. With KAP, this is when I start looking at placing subjects on the 1/3 lines, when I start looking at leading lines and golden mean curves, and when I start looking for balance and motion. On the ground all this happens at the viewfinder or on the ground glass. But for KAP the real art starts in the darkroom or on the computer.

When cropping it is important to keep your final print product in mind. If this is for an 8x10, it needs to be cropped to that ratio. If it's for a CD cover, the ratio needs to be square. If it's for a poster, you need to know the dimensions of the poster, or the image area of the poster to be precise. And if it's for some indeterminate purpose like monitor wallpapers, you may not be able to crop at all. In those cases it's better to leave your options open.

Once the images are cropped, I'll save them under their new names, by subject. "Kua Bay Abstract" "Boogie in the Big Blue" "Can I Play Too" are typical ones. This is where the pictures take on their names. Past that point it's how I think of them, so it's important to choose carefully. Once the name is chosen, I'll jot that down in my notebook beside that frame number or that collection of frame numbers.

From here on out things get a little more dicey. This is where the bulk of the changes in my workflow have happened, because this is where the nit pickey details of getting images ready for print really kick in. At this point we have images that have been assembled, if necessary, had optical distortions of the lens removed, if necessary, and have been cropped for composition and the choice of print medium. But the color of the individual pixels is still untouched.

In darkroom printing, this is the point when a paper is chosen, a developer is selected and mixed, and the test strips get made to check for proper choice of contrast filter, exposure time, development time, etc. In short this is when the final print medium is chosen, and when the picture is tuned for that medium.

In digital printing, the same is true. Since the end result in this case is a book printed at Blurb, that's the example I'll use. The first step is to have a calibrated system so you know what you're going to get on the printed page. I wound up getting a Spyder2Express, which is a combination of a Spyder2 colorimeter and the Spyder2Express software for calibrating monitors. This is a very bare-bones calibration system, but it's all I need in order to calibrate my monitor for printing books at Blurb. More advanced systems allow you to calibrate projector systems, or develop ICC profiles for printers. Since I have the ICC profile for the printers, paper, and inks used on the printers Blurb uses, I really don't need anything that advanced.

One by one, the pictures are loaded into Photoshop on the calibrated system. With the Blurb ICC profile installed, I can preview what the picture will look like in print. Levels and curves are used at this point to render the picture the way I want it to appear in print. Previewing is an important step because it can show you where shadows are starting to block up, where highlights are getting blasted out with details lost, and where individual patches of color are falling outside the gamut of what the printer can reproduce. This is similar to the exposure strips that are done on an enlarger to check exposure time, development time, etc.

During this process, if shadow areas are starting to block up, but the overall exposure level of the image is still too light, selective dodging can be done to bring up the shadow areas so they don't lose detail. Likewise if highlights are starting to blow out, those areas can be selectively burned in to preserve detail. And if there are certain features in the image that need to be emphasized, selective dodging and burning can be done to emphasize those areas of the image.

When doing this I try to make all the changes using layers in Photoshop. This lets me go back later and tweak any individual effect, similar to how test prints and dodge and burn guides are done on an enlarger. I don't really like the Photoshop dodge and burn tool so I will typically do this by selecting an area with the lasso tool or with the magic wand tool, feather the selection, and apply that selection as a layer mask on an adjustment layer. Rather than sliding the black and white points, I typically make changes by sliding the gamma point around. The changes are small, rarely more than 0.15 in either direction. Too much and the effect is obvious, and gross. Subtle is better in this case.

Constant checks with the print preview and gamut overrun using the ICC profile from Blurb makes sure I'm keeping everything in the range of what the printer can handle, and that I'm preserving detail in shadows and highlights.

This is also when color correction is done. "Blue snow" is a common case when a camera's auto white balance can be fooled into making a strange color in an image. Large patches of snow in a wintery scene can result in the snow taking on a blue cast from reflected sky. The Photoshop Color Variations tool can be used like the color correction wheels on a color enlarger to dial in the colors and remove effects like blue snow.

Eventually a usable image is produced. The image is saved as a multi-layer Photoshop file, and then as a flattened JPG file. Blurb, as with most printers, expect a JPG or TIF file in the sRGB color space. They won't take 16-bit files, or multilayer Photoshop files, or RAW, or any of a whole host of formats we take for granted during processing. Keep it simple. But save your working file in case things don't work out the way you expect!

The last step is to send things off to the printer and see how well you did. Even the best monitor calibration and ICC profile is no match for seeing the final image in print. That's when you get to find out just how well you did.

Submissions for the WWKW 2009 book open in three days. This new workflow is just starting to become routine for me. By the time I've gone through the hundreds of images submitted for WWKW 2009, I expect it will be second-nature.

Tom