All Photos © 2004, Joe Farace, All Rights Reserved
One
of the few problems with digital image capture is you tend to shoot more photographs
than if you had to pay for processing them. (You really have to pay for all
these extra images--there is no free digital lunch--but that's
a topic for another story.) If you're gonna shoot lots of pictures, you're
going to need software to manage them.
ACD Systems' ACDSee 7 software for Windows supports more than 40 different
image file formats, including raw formats from Canon, Fuji, Kodak, Konica Minolta,
Nikon, and Olympus. The program also supports the MPV and HighMAT (See "Yikes,
Not More Buzzwords?") standards that let you burn image and media files
onto a CD-R/ DVD-R and produce slide shows that can be played on any DVD player.
One Approach To Digital Workflow
The following steps should give you some ideas of how ACDSee 7 fits into one
possible digital workflow solution, beginning with image capture and ending
with archiving the best images onto writable CD-R/DVD-R media.
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The
first part of any digital workflow solution begins in the camera.
Here, two of my traveling companions review some of the images
they made at California's Mission San Carlos Borromeo del
Rio Carmelo on a Canon digital SLR.
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Step 1: Get rid of the dogs right away. During a break in
shooting take time to chimp your photographs on your camera's LCD screen,
erasing those that don't make the grade. Don't be hard on yourself
(unless you don't have many memory cards) and keep marginal ones for later
critical evaluation. "Chimping," if you're not familiar with
the term, is the behavior that digital camera owners exhibit when looking at
pictures on those very same LCD screens. Oooooh, ahhhhh, ooooooh...know
what I mean?
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When
you insert a memory card or CD/DVD into your computer, ACDSee7
launches and shows this dialog box giving you choices--including
doing nothing about what the software will accomplish. An easy
to use wizard lets you select which folders the images should
be saved to.
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Step 2: Copy the files from the memory card onto your computer's
hard drive. When you insert a memory card into a card reader or even a CD into
one of the drives, ACDSee 7 automatically opens a dialog box allowing you to
acquire the images, view them, or do nothing.
Tip: Unless you're using a USB 2.0 or FireWire device,
transferring images via a card reader can be slow. USB 2.0 readers are inexpensive
and fast but make sure your computer has a USB 2.0 connection, not just one
that's "USB compatible." That means the port is really USB
1.1 and is 10 times slower than 2.0. You can inexpensively add USB 2.0 ports
to your computer, so just do it. You have better things to do than wait for
files to be moved.
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Mouse
clicking a thumbnail or Select-Clicking the first and last thumbnails
in a series lets you rotate one or a series of image files, if
it hasn't been done in camera. I turn the Rotate command
"off" so vertical images are larger and easier to
see and show someone else on the camera's LCD preview screen,
but sooner or later I'm gonna have to rotate, so now's
the time.
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Step 3: ACDSee 7 has a context sensitive toolbar, so after
selecting an image or set of files, it displays the most commonly used operations
for that selection, eliminating the need of digging through stacks of menus
to find what you want. In its default view, ACDSee 7 shows re-sizable thumbnails
of all the images you captured and control sliders let you make the thumbnails
any size. Thumbnail size ultimately depends on screen size and I use 175x131
pixels for a Samsung SynchMaster 173mw LCD widescreen monitor that lets me see
more and larger images than traditional 17" 4:3 ratio monitors.
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Even
a model as drop-dead beautiful as Farrah can blink from time and
time and it might just be your luck to catch her mid blink. Use
the Right Click menu's Delete command to remove these files
plus all the ones you accidentally took of your shoes.
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Step 4: It's time to edit anything missed during the
chimping process. When you click on any thumbnail in ACDSee 7, a larger version
appears in the Preview window. Use this feature to look for people with partially
closed eyes, the inevitable telephone pole "growing out of their heads,"
and stuff like that. Right clicking displays a long menu that includes Delete.
Use it. Fewer files demand less hard disc space or fewer blank CD/DVDs. Although
ACD Systems says that ACDSee 7 is "renowned for its speed," I wasn't
wowed by its performance on a 2.2GHz AMD-powered Windows XP home computer. It
seems slower than previous versions.
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Set
Category is a pop-down menu choice thats help you organize your
image files by setting a category for each image file, so you
can search by category later.
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