Filing & Workflow

WARNING: This post contains me ‘getting my geek on’ and may bore you to an extent that even televised cricket couldn’t match…

Captioning, editing and transmitting images on deadline can be slow and difficult without the right workflow, especially on small laptops in bad conditions. If you’re used to photomechanic then this will be fairly remedial but if you’re fairly new to it and, like I was, a bit intimidated by it then this guide might help. Every photographer I talk to tends to do things differently, this is what works for me, your mileage may vary…

Filing images from a news job at London's ExCeL Centre (Edge sharpness? What's that!?)

My news workflow tends to live mostly in photomechanic and photoshop, I’ve previously used software like Lightroom but found I was continuously limited by it’s speed and captioning functions. Photomechanic does almost everything, and fast, making my life a lot easier! It handles ingesting (importing off the card), organising, renaming, captioning, selecting and finally sending my pictures with remarkable efficiency and a low system footprint.

Photomechanic is pretty easy to use, fire up the Ingest dialogue (+G), select the attached card and set the file & folder names (with the {seqn} numbering variable usually). But, like most of PM, the ingest function has hidden powers. If you’re using a pro camera that has the ability to record voice memos onto pictures, containing your notes, then PM can automatically import these and attach them to their images in the catalog. PM can also detect image lock flags on files, the ones done with the lock button on the back of your camera, and specially flag or only import these. This allows you to do a lot of your selections right in-camera for when in a huge hurry or filing live.

Next is the metadata. On importing a set into photomechanic, you use a tool called the IPTC Stationary Pad to blanket apply your metadata to all images as they download. In this case I’ve got several immediate presets on the go including agency, personal and a few from individual jobs where I knew i’d be reverting to the same details several times. I also have a few different specific client and agency ones saved as XMP files on my hard drive that I can open when needed.

IPTC Stationary Pad with Presets (Some metadata template detail obscured)

Setting your IPTC/metadata is fairly easy, especially if you’re working around a base preset and just changing the caption, date, keywords and location. Then close the stationary pad and hit ingest & the files will start to appear on a new Contact Sheet tab within Photomechanic. It’s worth mentioning that I only scratch the surface of the variables and code replacement options that PM gives you in your metadata. Especially useful if you shoot sports, you can prepare a program formatted list that will automatically substitute specified text for a certain code, so P1 automatically becomes the name of a certain player on a list etc. Even the basic variables can be huge time savers, for example your caption could require the time a shot was taken, so instead of copying the time from each frame into it’s caption, you just drop the capture time variable in and all will be taken care of for every shot.

Photomechanic Contact Sheet (in this case it's Julian Assange at the high court, well, he's in there somewhere...

I do my actual image editing with photoshop, but for news my images never usually see a layer. All my processing is done in Adobe Camera RAW (ACR). While I often shoot raw, this tool can be used to quickly edit jpeg files as well*. It gives pretty much the same control layout/set as Lightroom and being much faster than either LR or full photoshop. A quick tap of the ‘E’ hotkey on the image I want in photomechanic fires the file (NEF or JPEG) into photoshop, which then automatically opens straight into the raw converter no matter what the filetype is (requires custom settings*). I then do all my tweaks here and use the ‘Save Image…’ option to save it back into the directory as an processed, renamed, JPEG file straight out of ACR. This saves me huge amounts of time and, also, system power which is often at a premium on small, relatively low-powered laptops.

Editing a .NEF news image using Adobe Camera Raw (in this case Rupert Murdoch carshot, © Jules Mattsson/LNP)

* ‘You can specify whether JPEG or TIFF images are also automatically opened in Camera Raw in the JPEG and TIFF Handling section of the Camera Raw preferences.’

'Save Image' dialogue in ACR

The ‘Save Image…’ box in ACR, allowing me to automatically amend ‘_EDIT’ to the end of the existing filename and drop the edited jpeg straight back into the same directory. No intervention required from me other than hitting Save and then hitting Done back in ACR and moving onto the next image.

This, for me, is an efficient way to do the kind of basic image tweaks that are allowed on news photographs without bottlenecking on system performance in the process.

Once i’ve done my selects, edited/converted them in ACR and dropped them back into the directory, the next step is individual captions and wiring. As for separating out my final, edited, selections from the RAWs, many people tag, colour code or rate their edits. I’m lazier and do it slightly quicker than that, as the selected edits all have _EDIT at the end from ACR, I just bang the set name and _EDIT into PM’s search box on the top right, returning only the edited versions from that set.

Once this search returns my set’s edits in a contact sheet, which it normally does almost instantaneously, I can either go straight to (+A) to select all and send them out, or sometimes I will need to caption images individually as well as their global IPTC we applied on import. For this I mouse-over the image thumbnail and a set of options will appear, hit the ‘i’ button and a window will pop up to edit individual captions.

What you see when you mouse-over a thumbnail in Photomechanic

Individual captioning Window

This brings up the captioning window, which allows me to change an individual image’s metadata before hitting (Save & ->) to commit the changes to the image and bring up the next in the set.

Same with the nearby copy and paste buttons to move the same changes across several files.

Once all my individual and global captioning and keywording is done, I can return to my ‘set name _EDIT’ search results thumb sheet, select all and go to either File > ‘Save Photos As…’ and then export as one of my different size presets according to use, or with news i’ll generally go to File > ‘FTP Photos As…’

Generally for different clients I have different FTP presets set up. As well as obviously different FTP servers, everyone has different requirements in image/file size, resolution, naming conventions etc. This example is an agency, LNP.

Photomechanic FTP

Photomechanic’s FTP client is a very powerful, all-in-one solution for filing. I previously exported a folder and then sent using Transmit, which is a marginally more powerful client, but PM makes up for transmission speed with workflow speed and solid reliability.

The FTP client will resize, rename and even re-caption images as it transmits, and supports templates with what a particular client wants. So this has my news image compression settings saved along with the file and folder naming conventions for LNP. I then hit Send and the files should be on their way to the desk…

Assange photos out on the wires shortly after he entered court.

Hope this is useful for people, any questions drop a comment below or tweet me.