[adan]

On an Imac...Shooting all RAW (I only shoot jpegs for quickie jobs at the newspaper, not for myself).

1. Put SD card in 9-in-1 Digital Concepts card reader, and copy the LEICA100 folder to my desktop.

1A. Immediately unmount and remove SD card for later reformatting in-camera.

2. Rename the desktop LEICA100 folder according to the subject matter in the pix or other relevant info (e.g., "QM2_Jamaica", "Capitol 90_28 tests", etc.)

3. Drag the new picture folder to the appropriate subfolder in my Pictures collection, which today would be the path PICTURES > 2007 Pictures > 2007 03 March > Digital originals 03_07.

4. Open Adobe Bridge, and folder-surf to the new folder. Bridge draws previews of the shots using my defaults, which include my own calibration settings for color. Open a picture in ACR by double-clicking the picture in Bridge.

5. ACR automatically uses my color calibration settings derived from a Gretag Macbeth Colorchecker. I have default settings for exposure, shadows, brightness, contrast, saturation - but if I don't like those I see what ACR's "auto" settings do, or just fiddle with the sliders.

6. Zoom in to check for focus or motion blur - if the shot is flawed, I close it and go back to Bridge to delete it.

7. Apply my saved lens settings for the lens in use (e.g. "90mm f/2", "90mm TE", 15mm"), which mostly correct color fringing/CA. One click from a pull-down menu.

8. If the shot is under tungsten light, apply my saved "tungsten" calibration settings - also done from the Colorchecker under - yep! - tungsten light. Gets rid of the "magenta" red problem and other "blue" noise distortions.

9. If the shot is at ISO 640 or above, increase color noise reduction from my saved default of "12" to whatever works - anywhere from 40 to 100 depending.

10. If I want to see the shot in B&W, I zero out the saturation in ACR.

11. If I want to open the shot in Photoshop, I hit the "open" button - if I've seen enough in ACR I hit the "Done" button. All the ACR settings get saved to the .dng file.

12. Repeat steps 4 through 11 as needed.

If I like a shot and do some work on it in PS that I want to save (cloning out dust, additional noise reduction, resized for printing, or whatever), I save as a Photoshop document (".psd") to my desktop. Those pictures get filed in a "Digital Reworks" folder alongside the "Digital Originals" folder for the same month. Once upon a time I had a third "Film Scans" folder for each month as well. Haven't needed any recently....

Pictures for the web I just resize, convert to sRGB, and then "save for Web" as jpegs into a "To Web" folder on my desktop. Once a month or so the "To Web" pix get tossed or archived in an "Old Web" folder if I might want to post them again some time.

Once a week the whole "pictures" folder gets backed up to two separate external Firewire hard drives. Progressive backups, so that only the new and changed files get copied, not the whole pictures folder (currently up to about 64 Gbytes). Depending on the volume of new shots, this take 5-20 minutes for both copies.