RAW workflow with iPhoto

Since I got my D70s I’ve been try­ing to find a decent solu­tion for still using iPhoto as the pri­mary show­box but unleash­ing the power of RAW (no, not the power of Ra although that is

a good tune).

Prob­lem is, while iPhoto offi­cially under­stands RAW now, it doesn’t seem to like the Nikon ver­sion (stan­dards, pleeeease). And if you start edit­ing (you can hook up Pho­to­shop as your edi­tor of choice), it doesn’t edit the orig­i­nal RAW, but starts destroy­ing the JPG it made for dis­play. Com­pres­sion, compression.

So I’ve pretty much ended up doing what this guy sug­gest:

Shoot a RAW and JPG combo (unfor­tu­nately the D70s will only let you have a basic qual­ity JPG), put the JPG’s in iPhoto for easy view­ing and keep your RAW’s some­where else, keep­ing their orig­i­nal name. When­ever you need to edit a good shot (say, some of the ones you rated high when doing a quick browse of your JPG’s), find the cor­re­spond­ing RAW-file, do your magic, export as TIFF or PSD and import those into iPhoto in a spe­cial album. If you’re strapped for stor­age space (lap­top users unite), remem­ber to trash your orig­i­nal JPG’s after you’ve done your backup as iPhoto copies every­thing anyway.

For con­ver­sion to B/W, I find this method pretty good.

If you can’t remem­ber if you did edit­ing, see if there’s a match in your Con­verted RAW album, if not go to your RAW-collection.

For now I think it’s the best of both worlds. The con­trol you have over your pho­tos in RAW, even if your a full-blown ama­teur like me, is silly-impressive — on the other hand it’s a bitch hav­ing to con­vert all your pho­tos (mean­ing 17MB+ a shot as well), so the good old-fashioned way of “putting a lot of JPG’s into iPhoto really quickly for easy brows­ing” is attractive.

It takes up a lit­tle more space on your mem­ory card and it is rec­om­mended to get a nice big fast one (or more). iPhoto, how­ever will make a JPG-copy any­way, so once they’re at your com­puter, it should be the same.

Flickr export is easy with the Flickr export plu­gin — a JPG is auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated from your huge TIFF’s dur­ing export.

Now all I need is some stor­age sys­tem where I won’t lose track of where I put my RAW files. One thing’s for sure, I’m run­ning out of space real soon.

Note to self: Look into pho­tog­ra­phy in bright, bright day­light — my pho­tos are all burned out highlights.

Note to oth­ers: Being in a coun­try with its own Ama­zon rocks. Ordered some pho­tog­ra­phy books last fri­day, they just got in the door, deliv­ered free of charge.

Update: Andreas has a good post (in Dan­ish) touch­ing on the same subject.