Professional Information Technology-Programming Book part 58 pptx

Saving a Digital "Positive" Regardless of how you decide to share your final images with the world, Once you've done all this work you've learned about in this book, you'll want to save

12.5 Saving a Digital "Positive"

Regardless of how you decide to share your final images with the world, Once you've done all this work you've learned about in this book, you'll want to save final image that you've so carefully created

NOTE

You can do this for a single image, if it's one you've been spending a great deal of time on If you've been doing more automated processing on groups of images, you can use the Image processor to do it for a whole group

Here's the process for flattening and converting a single image to TIFF:

1 Save the last version of the image, preserving all of its workstages in layers

Be sure to add the suffix "fnl" (for final) to the file name Be sure the color profile is still Adobe RGB 1998 Also, place a copy in a folder you've

created called Temp for Backup Whenever that folder contains enough data

to fill a CD or DVD (whichever covers the volume of work you've done in the two or three days), back it up to CD

2 Either choose Layer Flatten Image or go to the Layers Palette menu and choose Flatten Image

3 Choose File Save As The Save As dialog will appear Choose TIFF from the Format menu Use the Save As Menu to navigate to the Temp for

Backup Folder you created earlier Create a new folder named after client code, subject/location, and date and open it Click the Save button

Here's the Digital Positive process for flattening and converting a group of images

to TIFF:

1 Once you've finished each of the images and saved them with psd and the suffix "fnl" added to the name, go to Bridge and open the folder you saved them to

2 In Lightable mode, look for all the filenames that have "fnl" as a suffix Temporarily place a label of a color you haven't used for anything else on those that belong in your target group

3 From the Filtered/Unfiltered menu, choose the label color you just assigned

to your group Now there are no other files in the Lightbox, so press

Cmd/Ctrl-A to select them all Be sure to deselect any folders that happened

to get selected

4 Choose Tools Photoshop Image Processor The Image Processor dialog will appear Be sure to make all the settings as you see them in Figure 12-42

Figure 12-42 Image Processor dialog

Appendix A Workflow Alternatives

Most of this book has been devoted to processing your images files with the

software that is included with Photoshop CS2, namely Bridge, Camera Raw, and with Photoshop CS2 itself After all, that is the software that's almost guaranteed to

be owned by virtually every serious photographer, and it does an amazingly good job and it's basically free (considering you've probably already paid for

Photoshop) On the other hand, you may be one of those photographers who will absorb extra cost and expend extra effort if it improves the amount of time that you have to get more work done If your hard work has paid off to that degree, by all means, take the time to inform yourself about the products listed below

These products are significantly faster at loading, previewing, and magnifying so that you can get through your culling and ranking much more quickly There are some exciting products out there, here's a look at some of them

A.1 Capture One Pro

Capture One (see Figure A-1) has traditionally been the raw processing software to beat These days, it's getting to be a close contest, but there are still plenty of pros that swear by it It's definitely fast and gives you a bit more control than Camera Raw in some respects You'll have to be the judge as to whether it's worth the extra cost and of giving up Camera Raw's integration with Photoshop

Figure A-1 The Capture One Pro interface

Capture One's advantages are as follows:

 Is the program that has been traditionally up-to-date on digital camera back formats

 Has both Levels and Curves; can adjust individual color channels

 Multimode sharpening tools

 Apply one or multiple image settings by clicking a thumb or many thumbs

or by preselecting and clicking the apply to all button

 Can batch process in the background

 Has a focus tool for quickly checking thumbs for blurs, noise

 You can buy camera profiles (two come with the program)

Capture One's disadvantages are:

 Has traditionally lagged behind slightly when it comes to supporting brand-new camerasalthough that gap seems to be narrowing of late

 Isn't integrated with Photoshop

To learn more, visit

A.2 Raw Shooter

People from the original development team for Capture One have formed their own company, Pixmantec, and created a new RAW image processor that is really catching the public eye and imagination It's really too bad (for Mac GX users) that it's a Windows-only product (If your Mac has an Intel processor, you could use Boot Camp.) The best news is that it comes in two versions: Premium and

Essentials Essentials is an excellent program and does enough things differently from Camera Raw that, in my opinion, it's worth downloading especially since it's free and always will be It gives your images a somewhat differentand some would say better"look" to your images than Camera Raw Nevertheless, it's still

completely nondestructive, so you could experiment with the results from both programs and save the one you like best as a high-bit PSD file And at any time you or your client has a mind change about the image qualities, you just reload the RAW file and reprocess it

Now, here's the thing you might really seriously consider: Raw Shooter Premium

It does virtually everything Capture One Pro does and costs $300 less Figure A-2 shows you the basic Raw Shooter Premium interface

Figure A-2 The Basic Raw Shooter Premium interface

There are quite a few features in RSP that are missing in Camera Raw Many of these are nice, but optional These are the ones that push my shutter button:

Direct download

You can download directly from your camera card or card reader into any folder, including a default folder for downloading all RAW files, but I'm not

so sure you'd be able to find similar images quickly unless you also used another program, such as iView Media Pro, Photo Mechanic or Portfolio for actually organizing your work

All adjustment tools in one panel

So you don't have to go flipping through tabs to find the command you want

Combination Curve/Levels tool

If you've used Photoshop's Curves and Levels tools, using these will be just

as intuitive, but faster because both command sets are in the same interface,

so you can use both interactively

Instant Magnifier

I'd like it better if it was a tool (rather than a command), but it works really well (see Figure A-3) Just press Opt/Alt-M to toggle it on or off If you place the cursor in the image and Opt/right-click, you get an in-context menu that lets you choose the size of the magnified area

Figure A-3 The Instant Magnifier shows a 100 percent magnified view centered anywhere you place the cursor

Adobe Acquires Raw Shooter

This program, and the company that makes it, have recently been

acquired by Adobe, and their code will be appearing in the released

version of Lightroom and in Bridge/Camera Raw for Photoshop CS3