Mixed Workflow

We take two types of pictures; pictures we take to record events and pictures we take because we enjoy photography. The former tend to be JPEGs from a digital compact while the latter are RAW files from a dSLR. If that were always the case, things would be simpler, but, as ever, there's a lot of mixing between the two catergories.

Because of this mixing, I've been looking for a workflow that supports the kind of things we want to do and the different people in the family that want to play. PhotoShop is just too complex for most people but easy to use tools don't cut the mustard when you really want to get to grips with an image.

We've settled on Picasa as a general photo-managing tool; it's easy to use and does what we want . The RAW workflow is more complex, it's centred around Adobe PhotoShop and can have JPEG, DNG and Adobe TIFF variants of the same picture (maybe more on the RAW workflow in another post, but for now: the JPEG is the camera processed version and great for viewing in Picasa by the whole family; the DNG is the RAW file from the camera used for manipulation in PhotoShop; while the TIFFs are manipulated versions of the image, frequently 16-bit monochrome with multiple layers).

Until recently,the problem has been linking to two workflows together. I really wanted to be able to jump from an image in Picasa to the DNG or TIFF in an editor... and now I can.

I've written a small utility that looks for different types of the same image. It does this by comparing file names and extensions with a peek and the files magic number. Given, say, a JPEG image, the utility shows me if there's a DNG or TIFF equivalent and lets me open the file using a preferred editor. Since the utility is set as the default application for JPEG files, I can use Picasa's Open File command to jump out of Picasa and into PhotoShop with the DNG.

Here's a typical view in Picasa, in this example I'll open the picture of the crane...


The Open File option sends the path to the JPEG that's being viewed in Picasa to the utility...

Which, in this case detects the JPEG and a DNG (no TIFF). There's a precedence for TIFF, then DNG, then JPEG so here it's defaulted to PhotoShop as the application to launch...



...which then loads the DNG image for editing.


Now this is an area that someone really needs to get a grip on...