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tvphung
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p.1 #1 · What do you guys finally keep?

So my flow is normal:
- Import
- Work on RAW, export Uncompressed TIF
- Work on TIF, export JPG in various sizes

Now, each of my TIF file is like 60meg, I'd like to keep them instead of the full size JPG, but it's too big for me to keep.

Question is: What do you guys keep at the end? TIF + JPGs for presentation? or just TIF and export JPG when needed? or do you have a favorite lossless (or close to) that will reduce the size greatly (comparing to the uncompressed TIF)? .. I'm thinking of BMP, pixel by pixel.. any one know how big it would be?

Edited on Feb 12, 2008 at 09:05 PM

Feb 12, 2008 at 09:03 PM

ohenry
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p.1 #2 · What do you guys finally keep?

I keep the original, a copy of the original in dng format, a master with all layers in tif format, and any final flattened copies...all in tiff/psd format and jpg for those on the web. I don't bother with images that are not keepers. The original is there, but I don't process them.

Storage is cheap.

Feb 12, 2008 at 09:21 PM

BenV
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p.1 #3 · What do you guys finally keep?

I keep all my raws

Feb 12, 2008 at 09:30 PM

tvphung
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p.1 #4 · What do you guys finally keep?

Wow you guys are extreme..

The thought of keeping TIF isn't so bad now.

Feb 12, 2008 at 09:40 PM

Qranc
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p.1 #5 · What do you guys finally keep?

I keep RAW files as they are (sometimes saved with edits before conversion but it's saved as a raw file). Exported to TIFF and if editing with PS saved with layers as a PSD. A third version is the final. Usually three copies of each file.

Rene

Feb 12, 2008 at 10:05 PM

HinduG
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p.1 #6 · What do you guys finally keep?

I keep *everything*

Disk space is so cheap now, there doesn't seem to be a reason not too.

Feb 12, 2008 at 10:08 PM

paulhodson
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p.1 #7 · What do you guys finally keep?

Always keep the Raw - then you can start again from the beginning

If you have done extreme editing keep a layered tiff or psd file - so you don't have to start again from the beginning!

Otherwise keep a jpeg - which is fine for most purposes

PS - plus backups of course

Edited on Feb 12, 2008 at 10:21 PM

Feb 12, 2008 at 10:18 PM

tvphung
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p.1 #8 · What do you guys finally keep?

is there anyone like portable like me? .. i hope i can hear from you guys that only keep JPGs ...so i can feel better?=)

I read the workflow from Digital Photography On The Net (you know the white pages with Canon Reviews). His work is very nice i thought.. and he only kept JPGs + 25% of his RAW files. I thought keeping the uncompressed TIFF is already going overboard.

Feb 12, 2008 at 10:25 PM

christo™
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p.1 #9 · What do you guys finally keep?

For me it depends on what I'm shooting and what the outputs will be.

For a zillion shot event, I'll shoot large/fine JPEG only, usually with custom WB, and keep only the original JPEGs and the final reprocessed JPEGs (which have typically had a simple process for sharpening, and some re-rezzing / file size reduction), plus maybe a few shots where I fixed an oops. Some months after the shoot when orders go away, I'll throw away the reprocessed images and just keep the original JPEGs. Oh, yeah, everything is sRGB

For most other things I shoot RAW plus (sRGB) medium JPEG. If I'm in a hurry and the WB is on target the JPEGs with a one-pass garbage discard are the instant proof set. If the WB is hosed, the JPEGs go into the recycle bin right quick. Anything that gets ordered or I care about gets processed from raws. I make a subdirectory called "keepers", and a few subdirectories under that. If I'm using C1 (larger batches), I process into 16 bpcpp TIFF images, then get to work in PS. The TIFF images get discarded after saving in .PSD. What comes after the .PSD depends on what the outputs are, but if it's screen, I'll usually keep the set of final flattened JPEGs (they're small) along with the .PSD and RAW files. Some months later, the stuff that didn't make it into the "keepers" subdirectory, raws and JPEGs get deleted. If the RAW processing and PS work was pretty elementary, I will usually discard all the .PSD's that didn't have some special extra work on them.

My weeding process is three-pass: first ditch all the dups, subject-blinked, pix of people's butts, and Bozo-the-Photographer messed up stuff immediately. Second, separate anything that gets ordered or really catches my eye from the main memory card dump directory, and only keep the original camera images for anything that doesn't make the cut. Finally, "some months later", I make another, harsher cut and anything that didn't make the grade gets axed. Also anything I can easily reproduce from the source images with the basic processing steps for the batch. For stuff I go nuts with like hand sharpening in regions and/or playing games in PS, I'll keep the .PSD's forever, often more than one for each image I spent real time on with intermediate stages of the PS work saved off as separate files.

I agree that storage is cheap and keeps getting cheaper, but time sure isn't. While, or immediately after, processing on whatever workstation(s), I migrate all files for an event to my RAID 10 NASD. When I have time, I archive to DVD, and that's usually when the final harsh cut comes in because DVD's just don't fit that much. They also need to be burned in duplicate, labeled, filed, and reburnt some years later -- adds up to significant overhead.

Anyone who says "storage is cheap" and "I keep EVERYTHING" -- well, I understand where you are coming from. Been there, had that attitude. Just wait a few years

Right now, the SATA II HDD RAID arrays with the built-in RAID controller support on the motherboards makes the hard disk storage deal sweet, but the optical media is lagging. The BlueRay / HD DVD stuff is still way too expensive and way too slow for me, and 4.7GB is just too small a chunk with the time it takes per chunk to burn, label, and file.

Edited by christo™ on Feb 12, 2008 at 04:53 PM GMT

Edited by christo™ on Feb 12, 2008 at 04:53 PM GMT

Edited on Feb 12, 2008 at 10:53 PM

Feb 12, 2008 at 10:33 PM

egd5
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p.1 #10 · What do you guys finally keep?

I too have debated with myself about what to keep. Currently I do the same workflow as you,OP. I still can't decide whether to keep the final version as a tiff or jpg. I know storage is relatively cheap, but it still costs.

Edited on Feb 12, 2008 at 10:42 PM

Feb 12, 2008 at 10:40 PM

mmurph
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p.1 #11 · What do you guys finally keep?

I shoot RAW+Large JPEG. I *laways* keep *all* the RAW and JPEG originals. Too dangerous to delete.

I used to buy 200GB hard drives for $40 after rebate. Some places would have a limit of 10 rebates, so I would buy 10 drives at a time. I would create an internal 200GB "RAW" drive and mirror it with an extyernal 200GB USB drive. When full I would pull both drives and store them.

You can probably get larger drives now for $40, I haven't purchased in a year or two.

Go to non-destructive adjustments in Lightroom with side-car files for your RAW conversions. Then after spotting, cloning, etc., save an edited file before cropping or output sharpening in PS, and then a print file if you like with final adjustments for output.

Storage is cheap at $.20 per GB. That is a RAW+JPEG at 15MB, plus 9 100mb versions of that file for $0.20, or $0.40 with backup. Costs less than negative files used to cost to store negatives!

Best,
Michael

Feb 13, 2008 at 01:08 AM

Patrick Cox
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p.1 #12 · What do you guys finally keep?

paulhodson wrote:
Always keep the Raw - then you can start again from the beginning

If you have done extreme editing keep a layered tiff or psd file - so you don't have to start again from the beginning!

Otherwise keep a jpeg - which is fine for most purposes

PS - plus backups of course

This is what I do as well. (All Raws, a few layered TIFFs and a few jpeg print files and web files.)

Feb 13, 2008 at 02:43 AM

christo™
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p.1 #13 · What do you guys finally keep?

ah, mmurph, we're at it again! It's fun, and we do fundamentally agree, but we're at different stages. Please understand that I respect you and I am not dissing you personally at all. With 1187 posts on FM, I figure you're up for it.

Why shoot RAW + large JPEG? If the WB on the JPEG's is good enough, you don't need the RAW. If the ability of the camera to make the JPEGs right (and you remembered/had time/the lighting and action was consistent enough so that it would work in the general case) is so sufficient, RAW is a waste of time and bits.

Not saying RAW ain't the cat's meow, but LARGE JPEG plus RAW? Whose bet are you hedging?

Next: hard drives: who are you kidding? The cost/MB of a hard drive is only partially covered by the cost of the actual 3.5" heat creating little monster that goes into the chassis. It's keeping all the bastards on-line, healthy, fed electrons, and doing something productive that is the issue. Eternally collecting zillions of images nobody wants isn't doing anything for anyone, and since the lifetime of a hard drive is miniscule in comparison to film, and the care-and-feeding of archival much higher, you are not doing the world a favor in archiving pictures of people blinking, the butts of aging people, dogs taking a crap, lost moments of the grass not growing very fast in 1/1000th of a second, etc.

Maybe you are the one that can make a perfect shot worth preserving every time you depress the shutter trigger, and if so, please PM me with the halo intact as I'm still searching for a true God, but in the mean time, fuggedabout it and weed like crazy. Don't tell me about how many cheap hard drives full of pictures no one gives a crap about that are wasting energy and will likely end up land filled with the pictures intact when the hardware pukes or the changes in chip sets make them obsolete.

Hey, if your entire photography set is macro shooting with zillions of light green grasshoppers sitting on dew laden grass in spring, and it trips your trigger, then by all means, keep all them files, but don't tell the rest of us that's the way to go. A lot of people looking here are looking for advice that works.

One of the biggest issues I have in sitting down with new digiphotographers, mostly my fans are older people in comparison to what I get the drift is the average on FM, and they have quite some experience with taking pictures. They LOVE the "freedom" of the digital world, have some problems with the fact that Kodak and Fuji and the camera makers pretty much enforce how half arsed decent snapshots get done in the film world, and want to get prints in their new found freedom. Constantly, they want to save every last crappy shot because all this memory is so cheap. Then, 90% of the time, I hear back in a year "I lost this hard drive, can you help me?", or "how do I keep all this organized, I have 10,000 photos?".

Trick #1: shoot like crazy
Trick #2: delete like crazy -- think film there is a definite cost per image.
Trick #3: Enjoy the event, get the job done, make prints, make computer displays, go for it.
Trick #4: weed again, if it didn't make the cut at step #3 it's a waste of electrons, gravitons, landfill space, whatever.

Feb 13, 2008 at 03:16 AM

annayu
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p.1 #14 · What do you guys finally keep?

I keep all the keepables in RAW, in addition the retouched and unsharpened files in TIFF. Not all the RAW files are used at first round.

I usually convert to JPG for delivery but don't keep the JPGs unless I have to sharpen, resize and reframe the JPG file for print (makes it easier to do a reprint and JPGs don't take much space).

Edited on Feb 13, 2008 at 05:41 AM

Feb 13, 2008 at 05:39 AM

paulhodson
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p.1 #15 · What do you guys finally keep?

mmurph wrote: I shoot RAW+Large JPEG. I *always* keep *all* the RAW and JPEG originals. Too dangerous to delete

Why do you need to keep the Raw and jpeg originals? There is not much point in having both (assuming you have a back up of the Raw).

Edited on Feb 13, 2008 at 06:53 AM

Feb 13, 2008 at 06:52 AM

claudermilk
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p.1 #16 · What do you guys finally keep?

For anything I'm keeping, the original file (RAW or JPEG depending on shooting method). When I'm shooting RAW anything I convert I keep the final JPEG. On rare occasion, I have a complex, layered TIFF & that is retained as well.

Feb 13, 2008 at 05:01 PM

Luis Pacheco
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p.1 #17 · What do you guys finally keep?

I agree with christo™. I shoot like crazy but I delete like crazy. I also enjoy the (happy) event and those unique and precious moments of life!
In my workflow, I rank some special shoots. For these (10%), I keep the raw image (in dng format with all changes) and the jpeg file (or jpegs, if I have more than one version). Most of them are also printed. For all others (90%), I keep the jpeg (or jpegs).
Happy shooting.
Luis

Feb 13, 2008 at 05:38 PM

Shaun Cox
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p.1 #18 · What do you guys finally keep?

I've never understood why folks shoot RAW + JPG. The RAW file has an embedded JPG that can be extracted anyhow, if one still insists on "getting the picture the camera took". (But the camera really doesn't make the JPG any more magically than the RAW converter would, as long as its using the same algorithm and honoring all the same camera picture style and white-balance settings.)

I just shoot RAW, delete the ones I don't like, and keep only RAW. JPGs are just intermediate forms I export from Lightroom for upload to the Web. I don't even keep TIFs exported and processed for noise cuz I don't want to be burdened with managing all of these as "stacked" with the original or something. Hopefully, Lightroom improves its noise reduction and adds output-sharpening and then I won't even need to worry about TIFs in the future.

Feb 13, 2008 at 10:44 PM

finnianp
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p.1 #19 · What do you guys finally keep?

I just keep the RAW and layered PSD. If I need a jpg or something, I recreate it from the PSD.

Feb 14, 2008 at 12:19 AM

beewee
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p.1 #20 · What do you guys finally keep?

My workflow for prints are:

Raw > edited PSD native rez > PSD uprezed & sharpened for specific print sized

I keep all of them since storage is cheap and I will spend 1+hr on a file for print. So far my largest PSD was about 1GB for a 11x17 print with multiple layers of edits and sharpened for print size.

Edited on Feb 15, 2008 at 12:08 AM

Feb 15, 2008 at 12:07 AM

Alistair Watson
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p.1 #21 · What do you guys finally keep?

For some sports events I do shoot RAW+JPEG where I have to submit images right after the event, with JPEG this is much easier to do. However, once the RAWs are processed then the original JPEGs get deleted. No matter how cheap HDDs are, I only keep what I need to keep. For my master files, the RAW is kept and a L JPEG, for some work I will keep a TIFF as well but since most of my work is sports and motorsport, I rarely work with layers.

Feb 15, 2008 at 11:02 AM

robstein
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p.1 #22 · What do you guys finally keep?

Shaun Cox wrote:I've never understood why folks shoot RAW + JPG.

I always shoot RAW but sometime I add a small/medium JPG in addition. When I am at extended family gatherings I am traveling and rarely carry a laptop, so it's just easier to be able to dump the JPG files off the card and one of those "1-hour" (oxymoron since they seems to always take longer then an hour) camera places. I have a HD80, so all the cards are saved there for my use later (when I delete any JPG created from the camera and then gen what I want from the RAW's).

The other time (rarely) when I am in a B&W mood, I find it easier to enable RAW+small JPG and change the JPG to B&W in camera.... the chimping is easier for me if I see B&W rather then colour & the camera will show the B&W even though obviously you can get colour or B&W from the RAW file.

Edited on Feb 15, 2008 at 07:52 PM

Feb 15, 2008 at 07:51 PM

Susan_S
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p.1 #23 · What do you guys finally keep?

NB - I'm not a pro, but this works for me.

I shoot RAW, unless I need the speed of jpeg writing shooting burst (it's a 20D - a bit slow!). I weed the RAWs after I shoot and get rid of the out of focus, exposed beyond redemption etc. Then I keyword in Bridge. Then I process the ones that I am keeping for personal use and save the jpegs (into iphoto which is as complicated a program as the husband and kids can deal with making prints and slideshows in!).

For any I use for microstock (which I tend to process differently and are a very tiny percentage of images) I save both layered PSD or Tiff files and a full resolution jpeg. So I will have a large set of RAWs with matching jpegs, plus for some files I also have tiffs or PSDs. plus some RAW files that I've kept because I think I might come back to them. All keyworded in Bridge according to subject and file status (well that's the theory - I'm not quite as rigorous about keywording as I might be...!)

After six months I come back and revisit the files I've kept, and delete RAW files I haven't got to processing, and weed out jpegs and matching RAWs where I only wanted them temporarily. (Does Aunt Jemima want this one of little Jethro ?- no, good, I'll delete it then...) After another year I'll do the same, only keeping the most interesting files that I find I still want to see.

As a result I've reduced nearly six years of digital phtography down to about 5,600 edited jpegs with matching RAW (or for early files original jpegs), which is both storable and manageable. Backed up on an external drive plus DVDs of the RAW files plus DVDs of the iphoto library - the equivalent of the family album - kept off site.

My big management headache isn't the digital files, it's digitising the archive of twenty five years of film. A real pain as you have to add all the data by hand to each batch of files. And scans are huge, and it's always a quandary what size to keep them as it take so long to rescan at high resolution. At the moment I'm keeping both hig resolution scanned tiffs plus edited and resized jpegs as I really haven't got a handle on processing scans yet - the files react to things like exposure changes and sharpening totally differently to DSLR files and I haven't quite worked it out yet! Hopefully when I have a better handle on what I am doing I can just save final jpegs.

Feb 16, 2008 at 07:22 AM

RDKirk
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p.1 #24 · What do you guys finally keep?

Always keep the Raw - then you can start again from the beginning

If you have done extreme editing keep a layered tiff or psd file - so you don't have to start again from the beginning!

Otherwise keep a jpeg - which is fine for most purposes

PS - plus backups of course

This is what I do as well.

Edited on Feb 17, 2008 at 02:28 AM

Feb 17, 2008 at 02:28 AM

picnic
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p.1 #25 · What do you guys finally keep?

I edit my RAWs, keep good RAWs, keep layered tiffs now (used to keep psds). I keep a year per external harddrive and back that up on a 1TB drive. I'm now using Lightroom and have over 7 years of digital files archived, most keyworded (prior to LR, I used Imatch).

Diane

Feb 17, 2008 at 03:21 AM


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