Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Let’s introduce the Tools

First I would like to point you to my newly created photo gallery at: weiersmuller.org.This gallery shows mainly my pictures plus a few (but very good!) from my wife. Nothing fantastic but I am starting: constructive feedback welcome. However the important point for you valued reader is that I will use this gallery to illustrate my blog.

The gallery was built of one tool called IMatch a good all around DAM software (Digital Asset Management). You can create complicated categories in IMatch to organize your pictures in any ways you want: pretty powerful. I created a category for exporting to websites or CDs. My Photo Gallery is my first automated export to a website. This is done using the scripting feature of IMatch and more specifically the (Extended) Photo Gallery (credits to Ferdinand). It uses mainly JavaScript and html. Nice but a bit heavy on the client side.

I also use a tool called RawShooter Essential (sadly the technology has been acquired by Adobe, they are working a new ‘replacement’ product called LightRoom). This is lovely and simple application to convert raw files. Raw file are picture files that are created using the proprietary file format from the camera vendor (as opposed to jpeg and tiff). You can manipulate these files in ways you can’t do with the other regular formats that are jpeg and tiff - for example you can set the white balance. Of course this adds a further step in your workflow.

The last tool I use is the obvious PhotoShop. I suppose we all now what it does! I use actually very few features of that product: levels, curves, clone … As you can see this is not much (check out the complete feature list on the Adobe website). The new LightRoom product is supposed to be RawShooter plus some DAM and some PhotoShop. (don’t miss an article subscribe to my blog, see links section on the right side).

In case you have not guessed my workflow revolved around these 3 tools. In short, I import the pictures in IMatch, here they go RawShooter and finally a bit of PhotoShop to finish the magic et voila!


That is it for my introduction blog, I hope this has been useful and I hope to see you back soon.

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