Workflow Raw and jpeg

[Mistiff]

Hi,

I have recently purchased a new Mac to replace my old MBA and increase possibilities on my workflow in photo/video editing. I’m not professional and my free time is scarce. I have a +200GB photo library and iCloud of 2 TB. We have two iPhones, in iPad, one MBA, a new Mac, Apple TV and HomePod.

After thinking about new workflow and searching in internet for three days, I have almost decided to work in Apple Photos + Affinity Extension. So far so good.

But when it comes to the workflow, I have many doubts..... I shoot occasionally at some personal events and travels and no more than 50 pics every session (let’s put two sessions a month). Considering that I don’t have much time to reveal RAW, i would shoot in RAW+jpeg and then keep only the raws that I would like to reveal and remove the rest. Once Raws are revealed, take them out of Photos and keep only the revealed result (Jpeg or Tiff?)

My questions are the following:
1) should I import Raws+jpegs directly on Photos or in Finder? If I do the second, then I should use another SW to decide with pairs are good or not (bad photos out of focus, similar pics, etc..) and also which RAWs are candidate to be revealed before importing to Photos. If I do the first, then I can do that straight away but I will need to export to finder later, as my intention is to have an structure system file to keep originals out of App Photos (in case I move out from photos in the future)

2) Once has been reveal, I want to export the RAWs to finder and keep them out from Photos to save space in iCloud. So I will keep only the revealed jpeg in Photos. How can I do that? Do I need to export the jpeg result and reimported again back to Photos and finally export the raw as original to finder? Three steps?

3) which is your workflow to catalog and organize the pics taken by iPhones and IPads? That is another variable in my equation that is really driving me crazy...

I Would appreciate if you guys can share the best practice in App Photos workflow before I start working with my new Mac.

thanks

 

[d.steve]

Ok, here's what I came up with. Make sure the "Copy items to the Photo Library" Preference is on (the default).

1. Import all pictures directly into Photos.
2. Delete the bad images.
3. Go to “Recently Deleted” and delete them again to actually remove them if you don't want to wait 30-40 days.
4. Select remaining originals and Export Originals to location of your choosing.
5. Work on remaining images.
6. Export finished JPGs (or whatever) to location of your choosing.
7. Delete remaining originals from Photos.
8. Import finished JPGs from step (6).

One of the possible downsides with this is that you’re losing the nondestructive imaging editing [Edit: poor use of terminology. RAWs remain untouched of course, so still nondestructive, but you lose the edit undo]. You’re burning in the changes to the JPG in step 6 and now you have one more file to manage. Is it really a problem for you to keep the RAW files in the library? A high 50% keeper rate at 20MB each would be about 1GB a month based on what you said.

1. Import all pictures directly into Photos.
2. Delete the bad images.
3. Go to “Recently Deleted” and delete them again to actually remove them if you don't want to wait 30-40 days.
4. Select remaining originals and Export Originals to location of your choosing. Or skip this and just export when/if you ever switch to a different solution.
5. Work on remaining images.

RAWs will be in the Library and in iCloud, edits are nondestructive, and fewer steps to deal with.

As far as organizing photos…well, this isn’t its strong suit. But what I suggest you do is look at Keywords and figure out what works for you. For example, in Keyword Manager, set up:

• Keywords for 1-star through 5-star plus any other things you’d like to track (types of events, whatever).
• Set up Smart Albums based on keywords and other criteria, such as camera to separate iphone/ipad photos from other camera(s).

Setting up keyword shortcuts will save time with classification, but you have to have the Keyword Manager screen on screen for the shortcut to work.

 

[Ledgem]

Your total number of photos doesn't sound terribly demanding, but your lack of free time and what you're trying to do with RAWs makes working with Photos a bit of a pain. I tried using Photos for about a year similar to what you're suggesting, but using Luminar and Pixelmator as the plugins instead of Affinity Photo. It proved to be much slower than what I'm currently doing.

Part of the problem is fiddling to get to the RAW. The other problem is that Photos doesn't have a good way to view multiple images at once. If you consider dedicated photo management software like Aperture (defunct), Capture One (what I now use), or Lightroom, they all allow you to see all of your photos in one pane, viewing one or more photos larger in another pane (or even on a separate screen, if you're using dual screens - another feature that Photos doesn't support). If you've ever found yourself torn between two or more photos that look similar, and you're trying to choose which one to use or which one to keep, doing it in Photos was a nightmare; it's much easier in those other programs.

I suppose one more problem with Photos is that there's no easy way to edit more than one image at a time. In Capture One, I can edit one photo and then copy and paste those edits to other photos. That's a wonderful time saver if you've made general edits and have a bunch of photos taken in the same setting.

(Photos also doesn't include brush support, but that gets into more advanced editing, and I assume that's where Affinity Photo comes into play for you... but it's a lot nicer to just do it all in one program.)

Long story short, I'd recommend redoing the general workflow. For me, I now shoot RAW only, import directly into Capture One, do my general sorting and edits there, then export. (I export to TIFF and then convert to HEIF using another program in order to save space, but you could just export straight to JPEG for simplicity.) I then import to Photos. I mirror the folder structure between Capture One and Photos, which really isn't a big deal to accomplish; tags are already exported with Capture One, although I have many more tags in Photos. Photos handles face detection and can also do geotagging, although I now use a dedicated program for that and add that data to the RAW files directly. In this manner Photos is like a photo album that has advanced features for sharing and for finding photos that Capture One lacks (face detection and a better way to utilize geotag data), while Capture One is like my book of digital negatives.

That also answers questions #1 and #2 that you asked.

3) which is your workflow to catalog and organize the pics taken by iPhones and IPads? That is another variable in my equation that is really driving me crazy...

I don't edit those, so they go straight into Photos. If I were going to edit them I'd probably still import them into Photos, largely to keep my libraries of RAWs vs standard images separate. I'm not sure that Capture One would be able to get that much more out of an iPad or iPhone image than Photos would. It's a potentially different story for RAWs from those devices (taken with camera applications that output RAW files)... but in general I don't find photos taken with the I-devices to be worth the effort of editing.

 

[Mistiff]

Thank you both,

Steve,
I see your point in step 6 and 8, but it isn’t a way to also keep the metadata file before you burn into a jpeg, so you are backing up both the original raw and the metadata file associated to it?

Ledgem,
I used to work with aperture and copying presets/edits from one photo to others was definitely a plus in my workflow. The reason shooting in raw+jpeg is to precisely not editing so many raws, because of lack of time. But I’ll take a look to Caprure One once again

 

[d.steve]

Not sure what metadata file you're talking about, as the metadata is inside the RAW (and the JPG), and you didn't mention any sidecar files (XMPP or whatever).

I'm also not sure what metadata Photos does and does not put in the JPG exports - that's easy enough for you to test.

FWIW, I was just trying to give you an idea what kind of steps you'd have to do to match the workflow you mentioned.

One issue is how Photos handles referenced vs managed files.

If you don't want the RAWs in iCloud, you can turn off "copy into library" and import the images from disk. The files stay where you had them. It won't enable iCloud for those RAWs, but now you can't delete the rejects from within Photos. It removes the image from the library but the RAW is still on disk where you put it. I might have misinterpreted your post, but I read it as you'd like to delete the rejects from disk. And, now, you have one more step to import the image to disk.

If you like how this works, then you have the issue of getting JPGs into iCloud since "copy into library" is off. The answer is that you'd export to JPG, turn on "copy into library", import the JPGs, and then turn off "copy into library". This is a terrible workaround. And now you have two images in Photos - the referenced RAWs outside the library and the managed JPGs inside the library.

So it's just the worst.

Ok, so that's why you want "copy into library". This way, because the files are managed, when you delete from the library, it deletes it from disk, but it's now enabling iCloud for those RAWs, which you didn't want. So once you delete your rejects, you have to export the keeper RAWs and delete them from your library to get them out of iCloud.

Personally, doing the full import/culling/keywording/edits/finals all in Photos is not a workflow I would use - I pretty much agree with @Ledgem.

My personal workflow is:
- Import into Lightroom. Files are automatically renamed to the shooting date/time and put into a directory structure of /RAW/Year/Month/Day/yyyymmdd-hhmmss-001.{ext}.
- Cull my images. Mark the rejects, rate the images 1-5. Use Stacks to group similars and pick the key image. There's an auto stack I need to get used to using. You can auto stack all images within x seconds. Zero or one should be a good head start on bursts.
- Do my edits.
- Export to JPG
- Import JPG to Apple Photos

LR is where my masters are and where I spend almost all my time. Apple Photos just has a burned copy of my final edits for the sharing and presentation things it does.

This could easily have been Capture One, as well. I just ended up choosing LR after Aperture was killed off.

 

[robgendreau]

Hi,

My questions are the following:
1) should I import Raws+jpegs directly on Photos or in Finder? If I do the second, then I should use another SW to decide with pairs are good or not (bad photos out of focus, similar pics, etc..) and also which RAWs are candidate to be revealed before importing to Photos. If I do the first, then I can do that straight away but I will need to export to finder later, as my intention is to have an structure system file to keep originals out of App Photos (in case I move out from photos in the future)

2) Once has been reveal, I want to export the RAWs to finder and keep them out from Photos to save space in iCloud. So I will keep only the revealed jpeg in Photos. How can I do that? Do I need to export the jpeg result and reimported again back to Photos and finally export the raw as original to finder? Three steps?

3) which is your workflow to catalog and organize the pics taken by iPhones and IPads? That is another variable in my equation that is really driving me crazy...

I Would appreciate if you guys can share the best practice in App Photos workflow before I start working with my new Mac.

thanks

1)Don't do raws + jpegs. You're doubling your work since you have to keep track of each pair.

2)If by "reveal" you mean rendering, ie processing, raw then Photos or whatever else you use does that already. Most all programs have a means to set default develop settings via presets or something similar. Or just use the software that came with your camera and cull in that. Or use Fast Raw Viewer; cull and then only import whatever raws you choose into Photos and the cloud. Again, having pairs just complicates this for no good reason.

3) I use Lightroom. I use its camera app to take photos with the iPad or iPhone, since it does raw as well, and those get automatically imported into Lr where I treat them just like any other images.