What do you do with the Negatives

[Laurie]

What do you do with your original images that you have post processed.
do you keep them? do you even keep the original raws?

At the moment I:
- Import all images into Lightroom, quickly go through and
delete any blurry, over exposed, under exposed photos.
- Copy the RAWs to my PC and store there until i have 4.7GB worth of RAWs and burn them all.

If i make any changes to a JPEG i will keep a copy of the original JPEG if i decide i dont like it or someone asks for the unprocessed original.

Cheers

[Paul]

Here's what I do.
1. Download the CF card to my 200Gb "Images" HDD.
2. Make a backup copy straight away to my other 200Gb "Images Backup" HDD.
3. On the original folder strip out the JPEG file from the NEF using Preview Extractor.
4. Go through each JPEG quickly and write down the blurry/crap image numbers for deletion.
5. Delete the shots I dont want from the folder.
6. Post-process all the images (If I have time) in Capture V4.4 then adjust more in Photoshop CS if required and save as PSD or TIFF depending on what I'm using it for.
7. Backup again to the backup/raid/mirror HDD
8. Check both HDD's data is correct then format the CF in the camera.
9. Copy the original HDD to an external 300Gb HDD once a week, this is kept at my work incase of fire or theft in our home.

Basically you want 3 copies, 2 in your house so you can quickly retrieve data that is lost, and 1 backup off site for disaster recovery.

Hope this helps

[Elizabeth1]

All our originals are on DVDs.. and some on HDD. We always keep the originals, unless they are ultra un-usable (we do horse phtography, so probably a bit different to things like landscape etc.)

[avkomp]

generally I download the cards to my workstation and look at them.
I whack anything that is obvious crap, oof etc.

I process what ever else I want to keep with usm etc.
when finished they get uploaded into the appropriate folder on one of my servers. I generally use a convention of year-month-date-subject in the folder name so that keeps things chronological. The data gets replicated to another server when that night, as well as backed up to tape.
Periodically I make dvd copies also and move them into a folder called backed up, but with the same directory naming convention as before.
infrequently I copy them to my p2000 as well for additional backup and the ability to take them with me etc.

overkill, I know but is more a case of because I can.

as for keeping the raws, I suggest it is always worth keeping the raws.
you may require an image for a different purpose and can always redo one of the raw images to suit a different finished product.
Besides, these days storage is cheap so there really isnt any excuse for losing images due to hd failure.

Steve

[katie]

For me, everything downloaded to the PC (the usual obvious deletions made immediately; blurry, badly exposed etc). Then I pick a handful I want to work on in photoshop and usually try a variety of different things, so end up with half a dozen variations of the same photo.

Just about everything then gets burnt to DVD or CD, all the jpegs and most definitely all the raw files. "Favourites" usually remain on the PC... I tend to keep more than really warrants it, simply because the learning experience means as much to me as the final product...

hehe, but yes, I'm new to the DSLR world, so: (1) I don't have the years of shots backed up like others may do, and (2) just about everything is a learning experience, but decent final product is still pretty rare for me!! lol hence my current workflow practises...!!

I'm just hopeless at deleting, that's my problem, lol...........

KA

[moz]

Everything gets uploaded into a "photo-new" directory and DLPro creates folders by date below that as it moves the images. I add a subject to that name, splitting folders as required. Then I run through and delete the obvious junk. Then I add ICPT data to everything as a bulk op - shooting location etc. After that I usually move the raw files into a raw subdirectory and play with the jpegs - runn through and select the ones I want for the web, create settings files to guide the processing of the raw images, add comments and specific ICPT data. This gets copied to the raw files once I'm done, along with the settings files. So I end up with quite a few subdirectories, and often I more than double the total file size. Once there's enough there I burn a DVD or two.

Once that's done they get moved to my "photos" directory and added to the catalog. There are folders for each year, mostly actually two per year to speed up browsing - some Windows programs get very slow opening a directory with >500 subdirectories.

This all happens on a RAID5 disk so there's some redundancy, and the files uploaded are marked read-onloy in the process. I haven't lost anything yet. Fingers crossed.