...while I'm waiting for the printer to finish.
So I'm printing an order, one which in the past would have been rather a PITA because it involves six different photos in four different formats or aspect ratios.
One image is to be done as an 8x10" portrait, a 5x7" portrait, and at 1.9x2.8" on a 4x6" sheet -- this to fit a custom commemorative frame from the 2010 Father-Daughter Dance.
The first two would be rather straight forward: load the original image, compose and finalize the crop, load the paper, do the page setup, do the print setup, print it.
But switching between the two crops always brought up a "Save the Changes?" dialog, and it was here I had to pay attention, because although many times I want to save changes, here I don't because all I'm doing is sending out a transient version to the printer.
But more than once I'd hit <Enter> reflexively, only to go "Oh cr*p..." because, no, I really didn't want to save that specific crop: I'd just over-written the original which is Not a Good Thing(tm).
But with Lightroom, there's no concept of "Save" or "Save as" at all - in fact there isn't even such a thing on any menu.
Which takes some getting used to.
Again, what Lightroom does is all "virtual" -- or, as I'd rather think of it, write to a database that records a list of state changes for a given image.
So there's no risk of saving some intermediate format of an image, because all I'd done was work through some new state changes, print that, and *poof* none of it really exists anywhere except the final print, and even those state changes can go away as soon as I need to edit the image a little.
Like print a 4x6" right after I've printed an 8x10".
Without having to pay a lot of attention to what I'm doing, because I'm probably doing something else on the other computer at the same time...
Very cool!
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
OK: Adobe Bridge...
...is exactly what I've been looking for to replace BreezeBrowser Pro and do all the front-end file management stuff before I even start into Adobe Lightroom.
I'm able to sit on one (or two, although not both at once) of my new Win 7 boxes and look at Canon RAW files that are on my file server, over my network.
I can move, delete, and re-name files at will.
And all much, much faster than I'd been able to do it on the file server box itself, which is running Ubuntu 10.10 and where I have to use gthumb to view files in the Canon RAW format via dcraw.
Totally cool!
I'm able to sit on one (or two, although not both at once) of my new Win 7 boxes and look at Canon RAW files that are on my file server, over my network.
I can move, delete, and re-name files at will.
And all much, much faster than I'd been able to do it on the file server box itself, which is running Ubuntu 10.10 and where I have to use gthumb to view files in the Canon RAW format via dcraw.
Totally cool!
Monday, December 27, 2010
OK: Adobe Lightroom...
...is simply an extraordinary piece of software on any number of levels: possibly more so than any other software I've purchased in a long time.
(Disclaimer: a lot of that hyperbole is due to the fact that I've been running Open Source/Free as in Beer software -- currently Ubuntu Linux -- for a good ten years and I simply don't buy a lot of software. But, whatever...)
Two core issues have presented themselves in the last several months.
1) I've been shooting an overwhelming number of photos at any given event -- on the order of several thousand for a Saturday's pair of Vashon Island Soccer matches, for example.
2) I had one of my two years-old mainline photo processing computers (Intel P4, 2 GB ram -- actually it was the root hard drive, a 250 GB Seagate, that fried) die as a direct result of the wind storm/power outages we had in late November.
So it became clear that something was trying to tell me it was past time to bite the bullet, get out the credit cards, purchase some contemporary computer hardware and finally make the move to Adobe Lightroom, with Photoshop CS5 available in the background for the really heavy lifting.
Long story short: I now have two Intel Core I5's, each with 8 GB ram and middling-good gaming level NVidia video running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.
And Adobe Lightroom 3, and Adobe Photoshop CS5 on each.
Lightroom is amazing.
Fundamentally it's a DBMS: a database management system.
The focus (hahaha) is on cataloging photos. Lots of photos.
I've just gotten started using Lightroom and so far I've got over 4,500 photos pulled into the generic Catalog "All Photos" for the two instances I'm running.
These are keyworded as they're pulled in off a file server box out on my home network, and can then be grouped and categorized by keywords, meta-data, date shot, time shot, camera body shot with, lens shot with, ISO used, f-stop used, etc etc etc...
Once categorized photos can be pulled into a Collection -- which in my case is a single event -- at which point I can start to actually "develop" the individual photos in (wait for it) the Develop module.
Except that entire groups of photos (or an entire Collection, if needed) can be "developed" using the same settings such that often the only photo-by-photo adjustments I find myself doing are to rotate slightly, and crop.
When happy, I export to whatever the specific end-use is: jpegs 600 pixels wide to go up on FinchHaven.com, for example.
Except that all of this done non-destructively, such that all the original Canon RAW images back on the file server are untouched.
All Lightroom is doing, really, is recording an (apparently) unlimited list of state-changes (white balance, exposure compensation, hue, saturation, luminance, rotation, cropping) without doing anything to the original images until they're exported.
Only then does some actual new image come into existence.
And all the work done to get to that end point is recorded step-by-step and is completely reversable, such that creating an image for my web site, or outputting an image to the printer for a reprint as part of an order are completely decoupled one from the other, and yet the labor put into sort of one end point is both permanently retained, and yet completely segregated.
Hard to get your head around the idea until you've done a few things with Lightroom, but extremely powerful.
More later...
(Disclaimer: a lot of that hyperbole is due to the fact that I've been running Open Source/Free as in Beer software -- currently Ubuntu Linux -- for a good ten years and I simply don't buy a lot of software. But, whatever...)
Two core issues have presented themselves in the last several months.
1) I've been shooting an overwhelming number of photos at any given event -- on the order of several thousand for a Saturday's pair of Vashon Island Soccer matches, for example.
2) I had one of my two years-old mainline photo processing computers (Intel P4, 2 GB ram -- actually it was the root hard drive, a 250 GB Seagate, that fried) die as a direct result of the wind storm/power outages we had in late November.
So it became clear that something was trying to tell me it was past time to bite the bullet, get out the credit cards, purchase some contemporary computer hardware and finally make the move to Adobe Lightroom, with Photoshop CS5 available in the background for the really heavy lifting.
Long story short: I now have two Intel Core I5's, each with 8 GB ram and middling-good gaming level NVidia video running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.
And Adobe Lightroom 3, and Adobe Photoshop CS5 on each.
Lightroom is amazing.
Fundamentally it's a DBMS: a database management system.
The focus (hahaha) is on cataloging photos. Lots of photos.
I've just gotten started using Lightroom and so far I've got over 4,500 photos pulled into the generic Catalog "All Photos" for the two instances I'm running.
These are keyworded as they're pulled in off a file server box out on my home network, and can then be grouped and categorized by keywords, meta-data, date shot, time shot, camera body shot with, lens shot with, ISO used, f-stop used, etc etc etc...
Once categorized photos can be pulled into a Collection -- which in my case is a single event -- at which point I can start to actually "develop" the individual photos in (wait for it) the Develop module.
Except that entire groups of photos (or an entire Collection, if needed) can be "developed" using the same settings such that often the only photo-by-photo adjustments I find myself doing are to rotate slightly, and crop.
When happy, I export to whatever the specific end-use is: jpegs 600 pixels wide to go up on FinchHaven.com, for example.
Except that all of this done non-destructively, such that all the original Canon RAW images back on the file server are untouched.
All Lightroom is doing, really, is recording an (apparently) unlimited list of state-changes (white balance, exposure compensation, hue, saturation, luminance, rotation, cropping) without doing anything to the original images until they're exported.
Only then does some actual new image come into existence.
And all the work done to get to that end point is recorded step-by-step and is completely reversable, such that creating an image for my web site, or outputting an image to the printer for a reprint as part of an order are completely decoupled one from the other, and yet the labor put into sort of one end point is both permanently retained, and yet completely segregated.
Hard to get your head around the idea until you've done a few things with Lightroom, but extremely powerful.
More later...
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Tried something a little...
...different for the Vashon High School Cross Country meet on Thursday, October 7, 2010.
I wanted to shoot something other than the finish line, something other than winners (one) and losers (many).
The Vashon High School XC course is laid out on the Vashon School District campus: the start is over at the High School, goes off into some woods on the east side of the campus, comes back onto the Chautauqua Elementary School playground along the edge of the woods, goes across the Chautauqua playfield, onto the jogging track that goes around the McMurray Middle School playfield, back over to the High School, and starts another lap. Two laps total; I think it's something around 2.5 miles.
I knew of a really neat spot on the edge of the Chautauqua playfield where the runners would be skirting the woods and then climbing a very short hill to come up onto the playfield, which continues on gently uphill to the jogging track.
Heavy woods in the background, bushes and roots and stuff to run around, up the incline which is infrequently mowed grass, and onto the playfield which is mowed.
Anyhoo, the idea was to shoot with a very slow shutter speed (1/15th, finally 1/30th second) and pan with the runners as they ran across my field of view and climbed the short hill up onto the playfield.
I was using my EOS 1D Mark IV and the 70-200mm f2.8L zoom, no extender, in AI Servo Autofocus mode and High Speed Continuous Shooting mode, which should approach 10 frames per second if it's not obsessing too much about maintaining focus.
I shot 881 frames total, of which only 196 (!) were even acceptable enough to make the first cut, and ended up using only 77 (!!).
In post-processing I used the Lasso Tool to select those areas of the face and jersey that were in focus and applied a little Unsharp Mask to the selection to sharpen the features I wanted to emphasize.
All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how they came out.
I wanted to shoot something other than the finish line, something other than winners (one) and losers (many).
The Vashon High School XC course is laid out on the Vashon School District campus: the start is over at the High School, goes off into some woods on the east side of the campus, comes back onto the Chautauqua Elementary School playground along the edge of the woods, goes across the Chautauqua playfield, onto the jogging track that goes around the McMurray Middle School playfield, back over to the High School, and starts another lap. Two laps total; I think it's something around 2.5 miles.
I knew of a really neat spot on the edge of the Chautauqua playfield where the runners would be skirting the woods and then climbing a very short hill to come up onto the playfield, which continues on gently uphill to the jogging track.
Heavy woods in the background, bushes and roots and stuff to run around, up the incline which is infrequently mowed grass, and onto the playfield which is mowed.
Anyhoo, the idea was to shoot with a very slow shutter speed (1/15th, finally 1/30th second) and pan with the runners as they ran across my field of view and climbed the short hill up onto the playfield.
I was using my EOS 1D Mark IV and the 70-200mm f2.8L zoom, no extender, in AI Servo Autofocus mode and High Speed Continuous Shooting mode, which should approach 10 frames per second if it's not obsessing too much about maintaining focus.
I shot 881 frames total, of which only 196 (!) were even acceptable enough to make the first cut, and ended up using only 77 (!!).
In post-processing I used the Lasso Tool to select those areas of the face and jersey that were in focus and applied a little Unsharp Mask to the selection to sharpen the features I wanted to emphasize.
All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how they came out.
Monday, October 4, 2010
There is an immediate answer...
...to the weird lighting in the Vashon High School gym issue.
That issue was the apparent fact that at a shutter speed of 250th sec and up it's quite possible to capture the changing light output/light color as the metal halide gym lights cycle on-and-off-and-on at 120 hz or 120 times a second.
Consider the following, as-shot:
ISO 12,800, 400th second at f5.0, Auto White Balance.
Not bad, really, and maybe some snapshot-shooters would be satisfied, but to me it's way, way too cool and bluish.
(I've been researching the detailed EXIF data for Canon EOS 1D Mark IV RAW files, and I have yet to figure out just exactly how Canon encodes the white balance data for a photo shot on "Auto White Balance". It's got to be in there somewhere, but currently I'm thinking it's not expressed in degrees Kelvin but rather in an RGGB quadruplet, which I have yet to find/decypher).
Merely doing the RAW conversion with the White Balance set to Fluorescent (approximately 4000 degrees K) improves the photo quite a bit:
except that now it's too yellow-y and the skin tones are too flat.
So, clicking on "More settings" brings up the "Additional Settings" (!) dialog, where we can fiddle with all sort of stuff.
We've got a Blue B9 ... B3 ... 0 ... A3 ... A9 Amber slider, a Green G9 ... 0 ... M9 Magenta slider, and a "Color Tone" drop-down -- which is actually Reddish skin tone -4 ... 0/as-shot ... +4 Yellowish skin tone range -- to play with.
Remember since we're talking about light, we're talking Additive Color here.
Take a look at the Additive Color wheel and green is opposite magenta (which is the combination of red and blue) while blue is opposite yellow ("amber" here) -- yellow being red and green combined.
Which is why our pairings here are "blue" to "amber" and "green" to "magenta".
Why "skin tone" rather than a "red" to "cyan" pairing? I'd guess that a lot of real-world photography has a greater need of fiddling with skin tone rather than fiddling with colors ranging from red to cyan. Also, "skin tone" is a specific adjustment in the Canon EOS Picture Style system, which is what we're really doing here: making micro-adjustments to Canon RAW files before we convert them to tiffs.
Anyhoo, when I pull over the Blue to B5, and dropped down the Skin Tone to -4 Reddish, I get something that I like better, at least, than any other setting.
The floor particularly has lost a little yellow, the skin tones look a little more alive, the green of the uniforms seems to have a little more pop, and we're good to go.
(Note that despite all the sliders and pull-down dialogs this all ends up being really subjective, and also implies a calibrated monitor, which I have).
Here's the finished product:
So to correct the weird lighting issues from the volleyball match I shot in the Vashon High School gym I ended up fiddling with the Blue-Amber slider particularly, added in a touch of Magenta on a couple, and pulled up or down the Skin Tone a taste on a few.
And they came out OK, at least as OK as I was willing to spend time with them.
The real test will be photographing the next VHS volleyball match this coming Friday.
That issue was the apparent fact that at a shutter speed of 250th sec and up it's quite possible to capture the changing light output/light color as the metal halide gym lights cycle on-and-off-and-on at 120 hz or 120 times a second.
Consider the following, as-shot:
ISO 12,800, 400th second at f5.0, Auto White Balance.
Not bad, really, and maybe some snapshot-shooters would be satisfied, but to me it's way, way too cool and bluish.
(I've been researching the detailed EXIF data for Canon EOS 1D Mark IV RAW files, and I have yet to figure out just exactly how Canon encodes the white balance data for a photo shot on "Auto White Balance". It's got to be in there somewhere, but currently I'm thinking it's not expressed in degrees Kelvin but rather in an RGGB quadruplet, which I have yet to find/decypher).
Merely doing the RAW conversion with the White Balance set to Fluorescent (approximately 4000 degrees K) improves the photo quite a bit:
except that now it's too yellow-y and the skin tones are too flat.
So, clicking on "More settings" brings up the "Additional Settings" (!) dialog, where we can fiddle with all sort of stuff.
We've got a Blue B9 ... B3 ... 0 ... A3 ... A9 Amber slider, a Green G9 ... 0 ... M9 Magenta slider, and a "Color Tone" drop-down -- which is actually Reddish skin tone -4 ... 0/as-shot ... +4 Yellowish skin tone range -- to play with.
Remember since we're talking about light, we're talking Additive Color here.
Take a look at the Additive Color wheel and green is opposite magenta (which is the combination of red and blue) while blue is opposite yellow ("amber" here) -- yellow being red and green combined.
Which is why our pairings here are "blue" to "amber" and "green" to "magenta".
Why "skin tone" rather than a "red" to "cyan" pairing? I'd guess that a lot of real-world photography has a greater need of fiddling with skin tone rather than fiddling with colors ranging from red to cyan. Also, "skin tone" is a specific adjustment in the Canon EOS Picture Style system, which is what we're really doing here: making micro-adjustments to Canon RAW files before we convert them to tiffs.
Anyhoo, when I pull over the Blue to B5, and dropped down the Skin Tone to -4 Reddish, I get something that I like better, at least, than any other setting.
The floor particularly has lost a little yellow, the skin tones look a little more alive, the green of the uniforms seems to have a little more pop, and we're good to go.
(Note that despite all the sliders and pull-down dialogs this all ends up being really subjective, and also implies a calibrated monitor, which I have).
Here's the finished product:
So to correct the weird lighting issues from the volleyball match I shot in the Vashon High School gym I ended up fiddling with the Blue-Amber slider particularly, added in a touch of Magenta on a couple, and pulled up or down the Skin Tone a taste on a few.
And they came out OK, at least as OK as I was willing to spend time with them.
The real test will be photographing the next VHS volleyball match this coming Friday.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Well, that may have answered...
...that question.
The question being, why the hell do photos shot in the Vashon High School gym come out with such wildly different color renditions between two photos shot within fractions of a second from one another?
Example #1 (you'll need to click on the image to see the full details);
And Example #2:
Obviously these two photos were shot within a fraction of a second from one another.
And yes, (Spoiler Alert!) they were shot on Auto White Balance, which may turn out to be half the problem.
But only half.
So while the color cast in photo Number One looks pretty much OK, Number Two (particularly look at the color of the back wall) has a distinctly orangey-pinky cast to it.
W, as they say, TF?
I haven't moved; the gym hasn't moved; so why the hell is the color cast so different (and this is a relatively mild example) between the two photos?
Now, it's a standing joke that the halide lights in the Vashon High School gym are appallingly bad anyway: they're literally different colors, such that you can stand out on the gym floor and almost see no two light of the same visible color.
This is due to age and maintenance, I'd bet: when the individual bulbs have needed replacement I'm sure that no thought whatsoever was given to buying a metal-halide bulb identical to those already installed. Let's get the cheapest, and be done with it.
Add in age (halide lights change color as they get older) and you've got lighting that pretty much sucks.
But why would two photos shot within moments of one another, pointed at identical parts of the gym, have such different color casts?
Turns out the real culprit is alternating current, and the way halide (and fluourescent) lights work.
Halide (and fluorescent) lights are actually cycling on and off at 120 hertz or 120 times per second -- at least those with older non-electronic ballasts -- which I'm sure is what the VHS gym lights are.
Way too fast for the human optic system to see, but not too fast for a camera taking ten shots per second at an exposure of 250th second per.
So apparently what I'm catching here is the actual change in light output/color output of the lights as they cycle on and off at 120 hz.
OK: fine.
What to do about it?
Slowing the shutter speed down to, say, a 60th or a 30th of a second might do it, but that's not going to work for shooting sports.
So I think the strategy is to register a Custom White Balance in my EOS 1D Mark IV and 5D Mark II, and not have the camera think that it's doing it correctly when it's looking at light that's constantly flickering and thinking it's got a valid reading for Auto White Balance.
During RAW conversion and post-processing I just tell BreezeBrowser "This is what color the light is, period" instead of whatever the camera thought it was at the instant a particular photo was shot.
I think.
At least that's the Plan of the Moment(tm).
The question being, why the hell do photos shot in the Vashon High School gym come out with such wildly different color renditions between two photos shot within fractions of a second from one another?
Example #1 (you'll need to click on the image to see the full details);
And Example #2:
Obviously these two photos were shot within a fraction of a second from one another.
And yes, (Spoiler Alert!) they were shot on Auto White Balance, which may turn out to be half the problem.
But only half.
So while the color cast in photo Number One looks pretty much OK, Number Two (particularly look at the color of the back wall) has a distinctly orangey-pinky cast to it.
W, as they say, TF?
I haven't moved; the gym hasn't moved; so why the hell is the color cast so different (and this is a relatively mild example) between the two photos?
Now, it's a standing joke that the halide lights in the Vashon High School gym are appallingly bad anyway: they're literally different colors, such that you can stand out on the gym floor and almost see no two light of the same visible color.
This is due to age and maintenance, I'd bet: when the individual bulbs have needed replacement I'm sure that no thought whatsoever was given to buying a metal-halide bulb identical to those already installed. Let's get the cheapest, and be done with it.
Add in age (halide lights change color as they get older) and you've got lighting that pretty much sucks.
But why would two photos shot within moments of one another, pointed at identical parts of the gym, have such different color casts?
Turns out the real culprit is alternating current, and the way halide (and fluourescent) lights work.
Halide (and fluorescent) lights are actually cycling on and off at 120 hertz or 120 times per second -- at least those with older non-electronic ballasts -- which I'm sure is what the VHS gym lights are.
Way too fast for the human optic system to see, but not too fast for a camera taking ten shots per second at an exposure of 250th second per.
So apparently what I'm catching here is the actual change in light output/color output of the lights as they cycle on and off at 120 hz.
OK: fine.
What to do about it?
Slowing the shutter speed down to, say, a 60th or a 30th of a second might do it, but that's not going to work for shooting sports.
So I think the strategy is to register a Custom White Balance in my EOS 1D Mark IV and 5D Mark II, and not have the camera think that it's doing it correctly when it's looking at light that's constantly flickering and thinking it's got a valid reading for Auto White Balance.
During RAW conversion and post-processing I just tell BreezeBrowser "This is what color the light is, period" instead of whatever the camera thought it was at the instant a particular photo was shot.
I think.
At least that's the Plan of the Moment(tm).
Friday, September 17, 2010
File and workflow management...
...have become the major new issues now that I'm shooting with my new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, and in fact for major sports events, shooting with both the 1D M4 and with my EOS 5D Mark II as well.
For field sports the 1D M4 has the 70-200mm f2.8.L zoom, often with the Extender EF 1.4 II for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm, while the 5D M2 has the 24-70mm f2.8L zoom for closeups.
Setups for both cameras is as identical as I can get it regarding ISO, White Balance, Exposure Mode, Metering Mode, and Focusing Mode and focus point.
Since I'm shooting in Continuous Shooting mode while the game is underway the 1D M4 is taking something less than 10 shots per second, while the 5D M4 is taking something less than 4 per second.
I'm shooting in M-RAW on the 1D M4 which is spec'ed at "9.0 mB 3672x2448" and in S-RAW-1 on the 5D M4, which is spec'ed at "9.9 mB 3861x2574".
Despite the fact that Canon says both of these produce files roughly in the 9.0-10.0 mB range, most of the RAW files I get seem to end up somewhere north of 15 mB each.
Go figure.
So I shot 2,341 photos in a Saturday of Vashon Island Soccer Club games.
(As a matter of policy I shoot *everyone* -- not just the "star" players -- on any team I photograph).
That comes out to 38.26 gB (that's gigabytes, folks) of photos as they came off the Compact Flash cards and onto a hard drive.
So my old method:
has become:
It's taken a little thinking and fiddling to get this down and streamlined, but so far it seems to be working.
And it may be more separate steps, listed out like this, but in actual practice doing RAW conversion and post-processing using two instances of BreezeBrowser running on each of two Win XP boxes means I'm really able to keep things moving.
And one major advantage is that I'm no longer even keeping photos that never make the cut, which I did in the old method.
Although I'm paying only about $0.66 per DVD/c-shell case for storage, I don't need to keep something I've only looked at once and will never look at again...
For field sports the 1D M4 has the 70-200mm f2.8.L zoom, often with the Extender EF 1.4 II for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm, while the 5D M2 has the 24-70mm f2.8L zoom for closeups.
Setups for both cameras is as identical as I can get it regarding ISO, White Balance, Exposure Mode, Metering Mode, and Focusing Mode and focus point.
Since I'm shooting in Continuous Shooting mode while the game is underway the 1D M4 is taking something less than 10 shots per second, while the 5D M4 is taking something less than 4 per second.
I'm shooting in M-RAW on the 1D M4 which is spec'ed at "9.0 mB 3672x2448" and in S-RAW-1 on the 5D M4, which is spec'ed at "9.9 mB 3861x2574".
Despite the fact that Canon says both of these produce files roughly in the 9.0-10.0 mB range, most of the RAW files I get seem to end up somewhere north of 15 mB each.
Go figure.
So I shot 2,341 photos in a Saturday of Vashon Island Soccer Club games.
(As a matter of policy I shoot *everyone* -- not just the "star" players -- on any team I photograph).
That comes out to 38.26 gB (that's gigabytes, folks) of photos as they came off the Compact Flash cards and onto a hard drive.
So my old method:
1) move Canon RAW files from CF card to hard drive on a Ubuntu Linux box,
2) burn to DVD,
3) copy off the DVD onto the hard drive on one of the two Win XP boxes I use for post-processing,
4) post-process on the Win XP box,
5) generate jpegs and web pages back on the Ubuntu Linux box that contains the local copy of my web site,
6) archive the DVD
has become:
1) move Canon RAW files from CF card to hard drive on a Ubuntu Linux box I'm now using as a file server,
2) review and tag acceptable RAW files over the network from a Win XP box,
3) move the tagged files to a new directory on the file server,
4) post-process the tagged RAW files over the network from a Win XP box,
5) generate jpegs and web pages on the Linux box that houses my web site,
6) delete unused RAW files that never made the cut, and
7) burn the tagged RAW files and the tiffs produced by post-processing onto a DVD for off-line archiving
It's taken a little thinking and fiddling to get this down and streamlined, but so far it seems to be working.
And it may be more separate steps, listed out like this, but in actual practice doing RAW conversion and post-processing using two instances of BreezeBrowser running on each of two Win XP boxes means I'm really able to keep things moving.
And one major advantage is that I'm no longer even keeping photos that never make the cut, which I did in the old method.
Although I'm paying only about $0.66 per DVD/c-shell case for storage, I don't need to keep something I've only looked at once and will never look at again...
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