Digital Darkroom - a workflow guide

Tutorial by Tim Grey

A Workflow for the Digital Darkroom

It seems that many photographers find themselves looking at one of their images on a monitor, wondering where to begin. They know how they want the final image to look like, but they don’t know what steps to take, and in what order, to help them produce the best results.

The best workflow for digital images will ensure a logical flow for adjustments to the image, optimizing quality without any loss of data in the image. I have developed a basic workflow for digital images, which provides a plan for working through the editing process. I’ll present the basic workflow in this column, with a more detailed look at some sophisticated editing techniques in future columns.

These steps are based on the use of Photoshop. However, the basic concepts can be applied to any image-editing software.

Digital Image Resizing

How to resize

One aspect of digital images which seems to cause a lot of confusion to beginners is the matter of image size. There are three basic measures of image size

• Pixel count - e.g 3000x2000 pixels
• Physical size - e.g. 4" x 6"
• Resolution - e.g. 72 pixels per inch (ppi)

Image Editing Workflow

Luminous Landscape tutorial

Image Management

Article on image management

With image-editing software you can create cool graphics for your web site, fix photographs, or work with scanned images. Image editing software is easier to use than it used to be as more companies have noticed that with the prevalence of digital cameras, a lot of non-artists need image editing software too.

Even with easier software, you can still make a big mess when you work with images. So before you attempt your next great photo retouching project, it helps to know something about how image editing works. A little common sense goes a long way when dealing with image files. If you consider what you are going to use the file for and think about who will view your files and where, you can avoid cluttering your hard disk with loads of gigantic and unwieldy files.