Quick Reference
The team has designed their materials for those who are newer to photography as well as the technologically sophisticated. The result is a set of clear workflow guidelines designed to meet the needs and solve the problems that photographers face every day in process, production and protection.
System Set-up
Storage and Organizational Practices
Preservation Management Practices
System Set-up
Hardware
- Get the best monitor you can afford, and keep it regularly calibrated and profiled in an appropriately illuminated environment.
- Acquire abundant hard drive storage capacity.
- Maintain your computer and operating system properly.
Capture
- Shoot raw if possible. This provides the highest image quality and the most flexibility for image correction and interpretation.
Color
- Always embed and preserve the appropriate color profile in image files
- Use a large color space for image editing, such as Adobe RGB (8 and 16-bit) or ProPhotoRGB (16-bit)
- For best possible results, you may want to profile your camera or printer
- When delivering image files, make sure both sides understand color profile requirements.
Image Editing
- Use parametric image editing tools for as much image editing as possible.
- In order to enable non-destructive image editing in Photoshop, use and save layers, adjustment layers and smart objects to master files.
File Format
Storage and Organizational Practices
File Management
- Assign unique file names to images in order to distinguish one file from another and to prevent overwriting of files.
- Create a naming convention that is easy to use and remember and that can be automated.
- Use folders to organize and store files.
- Use metadata and cataloging software to manage the content of your image collection and to streamline image searches.
- Design workflow according to image lifecycle phases: capture, ingestion, working and archive.
Metadata
- Embed credit, contact and copyright information in all image files.
- Add bulk metadata to describe the shoot and add keywords as necessary.
- Use the appropriate metadata field for more specific tags such as location.
- Be aware of programs and workflow steps that may strip metadata.
Backup
- Use a 3-2-1 backup (3 copies, 2 different media, 1 stored offsite) whenever possible.
- Clearly distinguish the primary and backup copies of your digital image files.
- Schedule system backups to occur at appropriate places in the workflow and image life cycle.
- Clone your system periodically to avoid lost time and lost data in the event of system drive failure.
Preservation Management Practices
Archive
- Archive capture files as soon as possible in the workflow to protect your images.
- Archive layered master files to ensure projects can be re-created in their entirety.
- Migrate to new media periodically, to prevent loss due to media failure and to increase the speed of access.
- Migrate to new file formats as necessary to stay current technologically and to avoid obsolescence.
- Validate critical file transfers to ensure the transfer has occurred without data corruption or loss.
- Validate both primary and backup storage regularly.
- A DNG archive can be validated with a much higher level of certainty than any other image file format.
- Use write-once media as part of your archive backup plan, since it can be validated with certainty.
Data Validation
Last Updated September 22, 2015
