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Retouching and Image Prep
We do very little retouching of images for clients unless specifically commissioned to do so. We work like in the old days for film. We shoot the shots, and supply the Jpegs or RAW files as they were shot, after doing a pre selection only. Occasionally if we have particularly dirty images we might retouch the dust specs, but pre cleaning the captors means we supply relatively clean images. Preparation for reproduction and printing is another field of expertise, Reprographics were rarely handled by photographers shooting transparency film and scanning house were responsible for the scan and retouch. they understood unsharp masks and curves where as a photographer was completely lost. We disagree that each photographer should prepare his image for print and that if a job is to b printed properly there should be reprographics specialist in the work flow. Just because he no longer operates the scanner or outputs the film now that a lot of printers are direct to plate, doesn't mean his skill and knowledge in preparing pages for output is redundant.
For images we produce for stock, obviously we have to work on the image in Photoshop although we try to keep it as simple as possible. Actually we 'cheat' as much as possible. We use Photoshop CS and the RAW file plugin for converting and working on RAWs if they are shot, although it is rare for our own stock work to use RAW. We will clean up any dirt and specs, try using the auto color menu to see if it makes the image appear better, if it doesn't we look at auto contrast, and if we don't like that we will tweak the curves but try to avoid that as much as possible. Images might be cropped, model defaults might get touched up like spots, or blemishes and if logos are too obvious we will likely use the clone tool to remove them. But really work on images is kept to a minimum. We may then apply sharpen more to see if it enhances the images, again its rare we would use the unsharp mask as we are usually happy enough with the sharpness of the images from the Canon cameras, and believe that they should have sharpening applied for the support it is to be printed on. We will more often than not just trash images that are not right exposure and sharp rather than work on them. A lot of work is made in getting the images right in the camera so that post shoot production is as fast as possible. Images are finally resized up by interpolation to be full A3 double page spread size for upload... working on the
Keywording Stock images for upload
If images are to be uploaded to the website for stock, then they can be keyworded as a batch in iView or more often individually when the image is being checked, retouched or cropped in Photoshop. We would normally resize images to be a 55MB uncompressed file before uploaded to the server. Images from either the Canon EOS 1D Mark II or 1Ds can easily be resized to this size by interpolation without any obvious loss in quality when viewed at 100%. Typically we add 10 descriptive keywords to the image, a simple title, a more descriptive caption and location details in the IPTC compatible fields. The rest we leave blank and do not use the IPTC category field as that seems to be a newspaper relevant category.
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Digital Work Flow