This guest article was written by Sam Agnew. You can find Sam on Flickr or on his personal photography blog: Smash and Grab Photography. Also visit part 1 (making choices), part 2 (film preparations), and part 3 (scanner settings) of this series.

Post Processing

photo credit: kwerfeldein

Once you have that nice 16bit TIFF it is time to load it into your image editor. I use Lightroom for a few reasons. One is that it is relatively cheap. Another is that it works well with less powerful hardware. Yet another is that it has a lot of streamlining workflow features for working with batches of images. Finally, I was able to leverage the experience I had already acquired when I used to work up my Nikon D80 files in Lightroom. Aperture is a similar sort of program that also has quite a large following in the photographic community. Regardless of what you use you will want to do a few things here:

• Tag, tag, tag! This will help you find your images and help others find them too.
• Crop to standard dimensions. If your 35mm scan doesn’t quite come out 3:2 then impose a 3:2 crop that will make it exactly that ratio. It will make your life easier if you ever go to print the image. If you want it a bit narrower, try taking it to 4:5 or some other standard size. Some images won’t fit nicely in a standard aspect ratio but most will.
• Straighten. If your verticals are nearly vertical but not quite it can really throw off a viewer.
• Fix colour balance. You can use an “eye dropper” to colour balance if you happen to have some true grey or white in the frame but really you should adjust the balance to what “looks” right.
• Adjust brightness and contrast to make best use of the available range of tones. The bright parts should be bright and the dark parts dark.

Beyond that it all depends upon your attitude towards image manipulation.

Archiving

Archiving is a big topic in this day and age. I am old enough to have seen my early writing and coding work fade out of my reach. They were all on Apple ][ 5.25 floppy disks. There is no way to read those anymore without access to vintage hardware.

photo credit: Harshad Sharma

One of the worst mistakes current digital shooters do is "archiving" their RAW files. With the possible exception of Adobe DNG, these RAW files are going to be the first to suffer "digital rot". This is the state of affairs where you have the data but there is no hardware or software that can read the files anymore. High quality JPEGs are probably the best bet because of the sheer ubiquity of the JPEG format or TIFFs if the desire is to retain all potential image detail.

As film shooters we have the best possible archive format already. The film itself. Keep that safe and you can always recover your images no matter what happens to your files or computers.

It may be, however, that you've got final images that you really like because of the particular scan settings and processing applied. I defintely encourage you to always have all your "output" JPEGs in more than one place. By the way, RAID 1 does not count. You want to be protected whether the drive is physically damaged or whether the drive suffers a corruption of data. RAID 1 only helps with the former. You should keep your files in two really different places. Laptop and desktop; home and work; internal drive and online storage, these are all examples of what I mean.

What to Keep?

What to keep is up to you.

Personally, I output an sRGB JPEG at the end of my work. This is the most universally readable format and won't easily get screwed up by various browsers or printers. Other colour spaces have more theoretical range but look like poo when one piece of software or other fails to recognise the colour space. sRGB is today's "default" colour space. If any software or device does not know the colour space for an image sRGB is the one that will be "assumed".

This JPEG is my "print" of the particular negative. Since I still have the negative I generally delete the original TIFFs -- oldest first -- as I begin to run low on space. It is good to keep them around for a short while because they allow you to revise your JPEG later without starting from scratch.

How to Keep?

Personally, I've taken the view that my work in Lightroom and my production of a JPEG is analogous to the "printing" stage (and some of the "developing" stage) of a classical darkroom workflow. The "print" is my treatment of that negative. It is what I would share on Flickr and it is what I would produce a paper print from (by giving that file to a printing shop). I therefore keep the JPEGs in an organised heirarchy and store it in multiple locations. Typically, the JPEGs are in the region of 6MB each which is much easier to store than the TIFFs. The film strips themselves are kept organised in binders. The TIFFs are slowly discarded after a few months. They can always be created again if I really needed them.

How you use your files will dictate how you make these decisions for yourself.

Tag, Tag, Tag

photo credit: chexee

Above all, tag! In this day and age you would be foolish not to use the tagging feature built into most image applications. I use the tagging in Lightroom extensively. On the web it will help your images be found. More importantly, it will also let YOU find your images on your hard drive and on sites like Flickr.

In addition to tagging I also have a little system of labelling the files (this is a Mac OS feature, there may be a similar Windows feature). For example, the best shots from a batch I label blue, the remarkable but not great ones orange, the ones with family or friends in red. This provides another way for me to quickly search the hard drive for the files I really want. In fact, I keep a stored-search "smart folder" for each of these near to hand.

At the file level I store each set of output JPEGs in a folder with a name like this "[year-month-day] [camera] [some words about the subject matter] [emulsion]“. On a practical level this ensures that the folders list in chronological order. As each year finishes I put all the folders of that year into a “year” folder (e.g. 2009).

A little planning will save a lot of heartache as your image library grows.

Pruning

photo credit: Brian Auer

The best way to maintain a good portfolio and to have sane backups (sane in size and searchability) is to prune prune prune.

Shooting film? Good! You’ve already started pruning. You probably took one or two shots of that bicycle that you would probably have taken fifty different ways with your digital. This is a key film-shooting benefit.

Now that you’ve shot, did you shoot slides? Pop them on a lightbox or in a viewer. You probably only need to scan a few of them. If you shot negative then by all means scan them all but that doesn’t mean that they all need to progress down the line to your post-production workflow. Maybe only ten of those need to go into Lightroom.

Do them all up in Lightroom (or Aperture or whatever). Some of them are impressing you, some aren’t. Why not only output the good ones. Lightroom’s “flag” feature is good for this.

Once they are JPEGs I will usually do my labelling. I have one label for great and another label for good. Most will stay unlabelled. If you do a search for your “great”-labelled JPEGs then you already have a great condensation of your shooting down to only the gems. You will find things faster, back up less and feel better about your work.

Whatever else you do, enjoy!