I'm one of those people that's totally frustrated with the world of RAW because I can't seem to find a good workflow rhythm with it. I get the benefits of shooting in RAW and that once you get into it you'll never go back to jpgs (so I'm told) but I simply haven't gotten there yet and haven't felt the dire need to jump in.
I was reading Digital Photographty Review today and came across this survey put out by Open RAW looking for photographers input on the whole RAW deal.
They have this to say...
"One thing is clear— many photographers and archivists believe that camera manufacturers are making important decisions about RAW image technology with little or no input from the people who buy and use their equipment or who are involved in the preservation of photographic works. The OpenRAW survey will give photographers and other interested parties an opportunity to have a voice in the further development of RAW imaging technology."
So, if you want you voice heard seems like this is the place to do it.
You mentioned raw workflow
You mentioned raw workflow problems - what are you doing now?
I'm very solid in the couldn't-ever-do-anything-other-than-raw camp. We're canon... our workflow high level end to end: on location cards are downloaded to two separate portable hd's so everything exists in at least 2 locations - we need to buy another 30gb of cf cards or so and they'll be downloaded to hds and also left on the cards until we're ready for them; once back in studio one of everything goes on a local drive on the server and immediately burned to DVDs as is & verified before being deleted from cf cards & external hd's; images are reviewed and we select the ones we'll be doing in Canon's DPP program (mmmmm.... DPP); selections we're choosing are processed in DPP for white balance, sharpening, curves, b&w, and any cropping is done in there too. DPP saves all those changes directly in the raw file; everything we've chosen to use is batched out to .jpg or .tiff from DPP and we separate out the raws that we're using/keeping from those we're not; those we're not we kill although the originals are all on DVD so we could go back if need be, but all of our "keeps" of course are still kept in a min of 2 places at a time. Anyways, we now have our colour corrected, cropped, sharpened, curves adjusted .jpg or .tiff (depending on what we're working on) files all ready to go. Any images that need additional love and attention or that we want to digitally cross process or anything like that we do so at this point in photoshop, but for the most part anything that we're proofing out to clients is ready to go based on the work we've already done. On our file server we have for any day/client a raw folder, a tiff/jpg folder, and a .psd folder for anything that we've worked further and all get backed up to DVD. Once the raws are on a couple dvds we'll kill those off the server for space, as any client orders or anything we're doing at this point we're doing off of the tiff/jpgs we've produced. One of our backup copies is taken off-site for everything, so at the end of the day in studio we usually have the original completely unedited raws on DVD as well as a final copy of everything; off site we'll have a copy of all the edited raws at min (.tiff/jpg can be batched out again if needed as the work is saved) in addition to any .psds for additional work we've done. In the case of clients, we'll also keep copies of album pages, thank you cards, or anything like that as well. For .jpg/tiff we use breezebrowser to view/select for additional processing and so on. We also use ACDSee for regular image viewing on our systems.
OK, so that wasn't so brief, but I'd be interested to hear about what your workflow looks like now and what's not working with it. I'm sure there are better ways than ours, but it's been working well for us.
I was the same as you but
I was the same as you but made the move to RAW a year or so ago and never looked back.
There are so many benefits from it the biggest (for me) being colour, saturation, contract, whitebalance correction with no loss of quality to the image. If there isn't the time to take the 'perfect' photo then it can be improved later without going through great lengths in PhotoShop.
Downside is the size it takes up... memory is cheap though!
James
PS. looking forward to your talk at Northern Voice tomorrow :)
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