My new digital photography workflow

Since the recent addition of my new work camera (a 6 megapixel Casio Exilim -- a tiny thing!) and my new personal camera (Canon PowerShot S80 -- a thing of wonder; such an excellent camera!), I've been working on a new photo workflow. I think I'm settling down on my tool set and workflow.

Both cameras shoot to jpeg only, so raw isn't an issue; that keeps the toolflow much simpler.

Side note: raw will be an option in my next camera, which will be a digital SLR.

I'm not using a Mac (yet), so iPhoto isn't an option. My next personal computer will very likely be a Mac.

I start out with my favorite file manager, xplorer2. I use it to copy my files from the card reader to my "raw" (meaning unretouched in this case) pics directory, which is broken down by camera and date.

I right click on the raw folder and click browse with FastStone, my favorite image browser/viewer. In the past few days, I've tried a bunch of image browser/viewers, including Picasa, ACDSee, IrfanView, and Photoshop Elements. For browsing and viewing, nothing beats FastStone's fast, flexible, and powerful interface. IrfanView (free, as is FastStone) is the only one to come close in speed. ACDSee is $50 and terribly slow.

Picasa is free as well, but takes a long time to import new photos. It seems more like a cataloging tool (and a powerful one at that). I think Picasa deserves more of my attention. I'll try to play around with it more in order to discover its other strengths. I've already started creating photo groups within it.

Photoshop Elements 4 seems powerful as well. I'm trying it out now. Its browser/cataloging tool seems quite powerful. It feels rather slow, but not as slow as Picasa. I haven't fiddled with its editor yet, but it looks to be very powerful, according to the reviews I've read. My Dad uses Elements 2 as his only image editor. At $100, it's a bit expensive. But I've not yet made my final decision.

Once I've selected the "keeper" images from the raw directory, I copy them over to my working directory. Here I process and then resize as necessary. I shoot 6 megapixels in the Casio and 8 megapixels in the Canon, and I upload 3 megapixel (2048x1536) images to Flickr.

From FastStone, I open each file with Paint Shop Pro X for processing, including resizing, cropping, and color/exposure correction. Why Paint Shop rather than Photoshop? Photoshop is huge, slow, and complicated. It has its strengths and purposes, but I'm really not yet ready to use them. Paint Shop is small, fast, and it's easy for me to get the simple stuff done quickly. I've been evaluating Paint Shop for a bit more than a week, and I think it's worth the $100 registration. I'll likely be registering it soon.

At work, I commonly shoot pictures for special events, such as the annual Halloween party or various birthday parties. I usually run the full-size images through LView Pro 2002's Web Gallery tool, and then publish the gallery on our intranet. I'll be looking for a more modern web gallery tool the next time I undertake such a project; there's got to be better tools for the job.

I prefer Flickr for sharing my personal photos.

So that's my digital photography tool chain for now. It's going to get a workout at work, as I've got an employee photo directory due soon. I've taken half the pictures with the company Exilim camera; they need to be processed. I'll be taking the balance in the next few weeks with my new S80 and my new tripod.