What Is Noise

Everyone’s got their own general photo workflow. Mine is as follows

1. Prepare to take photos. This involves making sure all gear is charged, lenses and filters clean, cards cleared off, and cables/gear packed in my trusty backpack
2. Take photos. Not that hard
3. Transfer photos to external hard drive in an Aperture library
4. Split into various libraries if needed
5. Create two or more “Smart albums”. One has items rated above 4 called “to upload”, one is called “X” and contains only photos with a rating of -1 or X.
6. Rotate all photos upright. Aperture 2.x no longer gets this right, as in Aperture 1.5 they automatically rotated based on the metadata. Aperture 2.x sees the metadata but does nothing with it. I suppose I could write a script to make this right, but this doesn’t take long
7. I use two monitors, the one on my MBP and a 37″ 1080p LCD. I have a mirror of each photo sent to the 37″ screen which I use to gauge sharpness, focus, blur, details and DOF. The MBP screen is used for all color choices (matte screen).
8. I rate all photos in the first pass quickly looking for gross errors, poor composition, blurring, horrid exposure, etc. Those get an X. I roughly sort the other photos
9. In a second pass then I focus on sorting the photos in priorities, trying to figure out the ‘best’ ones. I keep not the best ones as rating of 1, 2, 3 stars. Photos I think suitable for printing get a 5. I don’t give many 5’s. Photos I want to put online get a 4.
10. Photos with a 4/5 get a pass of color correction, cropping, etc
11. I upload the 4/5 photos to Flickr, and choose if they are Creative Commons or not. I’ve been using CC more often than not recently.
12. Photos that get a 5 might be uploaded to Smugmug for printing capability
13. I delete the photos in the Smart Album “X” as they are worthless and not something I want to keep. Anything that I might want to ever see again (alternate shots, etc) I keep however.
14. Delete memory cards, promote photos, twitter about them, etc. Start over.