Photo Editing Workflow
How to import, edit and publish a photo using Photo Mechanic and Affinity Photo starting with a raw file.
Photo Mechanic
When importing files from the memory card using Photo Mechanic, all imported files are copied into a folder with the date the the photos has been taken and the file is renamed. e.g. yyyymmdd/khm-yyyymmdd-hhss-10digitnumber.nef. During editing the filename won't change.
This approach keeps files from a trip together in one folder, it allows to localizing the the original raw file anytime and keeps the files ordered by date and hour.
- After import, review all photos, delete low quality photos (key t)
- Apply star rating to photos which will be edited (1 for muuuh.com, 2 for unsplash)
Affinity Photo
Use reveal in finder to localize the raw file to be edited. Usually, photo editing is done fast, not more than 15minutes.
- Open with Affinity Photo
- In raw persona fix noise and continue with develop
- Crop to optimize composition, keep original ratio
- Add adjustment layer curves (improve range dark/light)
- Add adjustment layer HSL (saturation)
- Merge visible
- Apply filter sharpen > high pass
- Export to jpg minimum size 3000x2000 pixels
All photos are exported to one dedicated folder. This folder is named by the year.
Publishing Photos
High quality photos are published in Unsplash.
All edited photos are published in muuuh.com:
- Add record to the website's photo database (camera,lense,camera settings, file size, title, caption, species and location identifier)
- Upload file to Google Cloud bucket serving the CDN (ImgIX)
- Re-deploy website which will publish the new photo in the corresponding page (species and/or location identifier)
Once, a photo has been published in the website, rendering instructions may have to be specified. By default, crop instruction entropy is used which doesn't work well in all cases. If necessary, entropy is changed to focalpoint, x and y coordinates of the focal point are updated in the database, and the website is re-deployed.
To learn more about how re-deploy of Muuuh's website works, visit simaec.net.