We need a break from all this talk of Digital Asset Management (DAM). Let's remember that managing our photos is a service to our photography practice. We are photographers first, and image managers second. Proper image management is a way to honor our photography but it should not replace it. Photographers photograph!
I fear that someday soon I'll be a bald, toothless, old man sitting in a rocking chair telling the youngsters of the world about the good old days—of negatives. My hair is already gone. Thankfully, the teeth are still with me. The rocking chair is still a concept. But the day when few understand the nature of photographic film and negatives is no concept at all. It's pretty much already here.
Almost all brands of photo-management software have the ability to assign colored labels to you image files. It's been my experience with clients and students that the label feature is, more often than not, ignored or misunderstood. People ask me why—given the myriad combinations of keywords and other kinds of IPTC metadata (location, copyright, author, title, etc.)—one must also be concerned with the assignment of colored labels to our images. The answer is quite simple. It's visual.
Organizing and finding digital image files—it all seems to be a forever challenge to many people. They set up all kinds of folders to try to keep things straight. The problem is that cataloging photos is a complex thing and trying to shoehorn images into a rigid file structure is a pursuit destined for utter frustration. One must be able to find and view images in fluid ways and organize them instantly according to the needs of the moment. This cannot be done by stuffing them into the static categories of folders.
Where do we start with keywording our images? I've had stops and starts and wasted a lot of time and effort trying to become a keyword ninja. I'm not certain what status I've attained but I have learned a lot in the effort. So, I present here some criteria on creating an effective and useful set of keywords:
I don't know anyone who enjoys tagging their photos with keywords. Most people consider it a chore. Most of us also put it off, do it halfheartedly or don't do it all. This is a shame because keywords can be so very valuable to anyone who loves photography. And it can actually be rewarding. It all depends on your attitude and how you approach it. Let's see if we can make if fun.
Please Note: This will be the last post on highlights for now. We'll be offering some advanced highlight-recovery tricks at a later date.
Every RAW processor will handle highlights differently. For example, being a Mac user, I have the opportunity to test image processing with both Apple's Aperture and Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom. I find that Aperture can recover blown highlights just a little bit more elegantly than can Lightroom. Yet Lightroom's interface is more straightforward and easier to master. RAW processors have nuances and characteristics to their resulting images that remind me of the personalities of various types of film. We can fine-tune these processors to achieve various effects but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
So far, our discussion of highlights has been limited to our work in the field. This makes sense. It's best to control just about any process in its early stages—this is true for most things in life, be it health care, home maintenance, manufacturing, or photography. If we manage exposure we pretty much set the stage for a good photograph. But, the real world moves fast and we sometimes don't have the time or energy to get a perfect exposure. Sometimes lighting is just tricky. Sometimes we forget the basics.
Exposure is at least as important in digital photography as it is in silver-based imaging, probably more so. As we've previously discussed, the dynamic range of today's digital, imaging sensors is limited. And when we lose highlight detail, the results are ugly. So, proper placement of highlight exposure is critical.
Don't blow out your highlights! These days you hear this admonition all the time. I suspect it's the result of the little blinky warnings all of our cameras now have. Personally, I can't stand the damned things. Blink! Blink! Blink! I'd rather destroy a photo due to overexposure than to ruin it from being distracted by flashing displays. I turn the blinkies off and generally use the histogram to keep track of highlights. However, I digress—that's not the point of this post.