From the Shot to the Retouched Photograph

01. FROM THE SHOT TO THE FINISHED TIF

The story I have always wanted to tell is the journey of light, trapped at the moment the shutter is released, until it becomes a finished TIF ready for delivery. Many aspiring photographers and photography enthusiasts will appreciate it if I manage to convey it properly:

As soon as it enters the camera through the lens, light is converted into millions of ordered pixels. If the quality of the camera and, above all, the lens is good, those pixels are arranged more effectively. What matters is not so much the number of millions of pixels, but the way they are distributed across the surface of the sensor. A pixel is nothing more than a tiny square with a single color chosen from approximately 64,000 possibilities, created by combining a value of red, green, and blue.

There, on the sensor, it takes on its basic and raw form (RAW), meaning that all possible information is captured, organized, and packaged in a format specific to each camera brand (Canon: CR2, Nikon: NEF, etc.). The camera assigns it a code and a number, and that is where the journey begins of what English speakers call the Digital Imaging Workflow, which has caused so many headaches for professionals and amateurs since we stopped going to traditional processing labs. Many people have never seen this process, which makes this post feel a little old-fashioned.

02. THE DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHIC FILE

In short, whether we like it or not, we now have a complete photographic-computer system installed in our home or studio after spending a considerable amount of money on cameras with a limited lifespan, computers, monitors, all kinds of hard drives, card readers, and a long list of other equipment. Photographer friends have asked me about this often enough for me to realize what a nightmare it can become to store thousands upon thousands of photos endlessly on hard drives without even having time to delete the bad ones. And this is where the story of the digital photographic file continues:

We now have the file _MG_0001.CR2 on our memory card. If we formatted it beforehand, it sits there alone in the void. Around 25 megabytes, with room for approximately 16,834 of them on a 16 GB card, but it does not matter: pressing the shutter is finally cheap, and _MG0001 will be followed by others with different numbers, 0002, 0003, 0004, and so on until we decide the session or the trip is over. At some point, when there is no more room or when we want to see the result on screen, we will remove the card from the camera and produce its first copy, its first clone.

It is there, in the middle of the session, among all the others, _MG_0001, which is usually the one that does not survive because it is a test shot in which the model still has the makeup artist touching up her cheekbones, remaining untouched and without a proper name. However, PRT_03276.CR2 * (now christened!) will eventually end up on the bright screen of our computer.

03. FILE AND TIME MANAGEMENT

To get there, we need a special application designed to rename, archive, catalog, and do many other things. I have always used Apple’s Aperture because it was the first of its kind to come onto the market, and it appeared just when I needed it, back in 2007. In fact, without the program I would not have been able to carry out that year-and-a-half project in which we had to manage around 30,000 RAW files for LatinStock.

So, as we were saying, we now have a series of photographic files that have just been copied onto our computer’s hard drive. This is the moment to clarify the enormous importance of this decisive step. Some people drag them from the card to the desktop, while others use Lightroom, Bridge, Capture One, Nikon View, or Aperture, and this is where the foundation of your file and time management lies.

Imagine a retouched photograph sitting in a Finder or desktop folder, without having been given a proper name, with only its preview and creation date, and compare it with another image that was imported, renamed, carefully placed inside a named project and album, tagged with the appropriate keywords so that you do not even need to open it to know what it contains, and which can also be emailed with a single click or exported at whatever size you want, wherever you want, and however you want.

And most importantly: we can extract all the information contained in the RAW file exactly as we want, fine-tune it, and export it for the final retouching stage, if necessary (that is another story), in Photoshop as a 16-bit file ready for delivery to the client.

From the image management program, we have complete control. Refusing to learn, or refusing to invest time in learning, will only lead to problems. I was going to discuss in another post something that has not yet been mentioned and without which everything can fall apart if it is not handled properly: the backup or backup copy. But that is another story.