« "Elements, My Dear Watson", a closer look @ Photoshop Elements »

Now that you have set your camera to shoot RAW (right?), what's next? Well, this is where your digital workflow takes over. A digital workflow simply means what you do with your shots after snapping them and they are still sitting on your camera's memory card. Taking the photos is only half the job. Getting them off the camera, archived, processed and outputted into a format that can be used is the other half. From my experience this is the part a lot of people skip because either they are not comfortable with these steps, or simply because viewing and sharing the pictures on the camera is good enough.

1 Before even copying your shots from the memory card to your computer, you should create a sound archiving system. Something simple that easy to stick to, makes it easy to find your shots five years later and simplifies backing up your photos. In your computer's pictures-folder created one master directory for your images entitled "Photos" (or whatever you find appropriate). This is where you put all your pictures, both the ones you take and the ones Aunt Wilma gave you from her 60th birthday.

2 Within your new "Photos" master folder create a series of sub-folders named 2007, 2008, 2009 for however long back you have digital images. Within those folders create 12 sub-folders, one for each month: January, February, etc. I find this the simplest and easiest way to organize my photos: in what month and what year were they taken. To further organize your photos you can create more intuitive folder names within the specific month. Say, you came back from Hawaii in March this year, then you can archive all your Hawaii vacation shots here "Photos/2009/March/Hawaii".

↓ My photo folder structure.

3 With the files safely stored away you can start processing your images (RAW or JPG) using your favorite photo editor.

4 Once processed you can then output JPGs tailored in size and compression for sharing on facebook, via email or prints. Now let's look @ Adobe Elements and how it fits in with the step three and four of the suggested work flow.

Open Sesame (open your images)

To start converting your images simply open them directly from your finder/file explorer. Alternatively, you can open the images via Adobe Bridge (Mac users) or Elements Organizer (PC users) which the software also ships with. Bridge and Organizer offer a great way to organize and maintain an overview of your images.

↓ Bridge/Organizer: Never loose a photo by tagging them with keywords and never forget an ISO setting by having your photos' metadata ready at hand.

Edit away

Elements comes with one of the most powerful RAW conversion engines on the market called Adobe Camera RAW (ACR). ACR is also found at the core of Adobe's other, more expensive photo editing software Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2. Basically, you get the same (minus a couple of minimal differences) RAW conversion options in $100 program as you do in a $700 program. You gotta love that!

↑ Edit options (plentiful!)

Frankly, describing all the options would take up an entire post (hmm! maybe I will do that down the road), but for now just toggle the window to full screen and play around with the different settings until the image matches what you are looking for. There are three settings I almost always tweak:

+ 'Recover' which will let you pull back much of blown out highlights.
+ 'Clarity' adds a nice punch to your image without over-sharpening it.
+ 'Vibrance' acts like a saturation-slider, but it leaves the skin tones alone, meaning you can bump up the colors in your photo without ruining the skin tones. Pretty cool stuff

The more the merrier (batch process)

A great way to speed up your digital workflow is to batch process your RAW files. Say, you went skiing one afternoon and took a bunch of pictures. Chances are that most of the images will have been taken under the same lighting conditions (probably ending up underexposed with a bluish tint), so instead of processing all 200 photos individually Elements let's you process them as a batch. There are two ways to do this.

One, open 2, 3, 4 or how many identical looking images in ACR and click "Select all" to highlight them. Now whatever edits you make (exposure, white balance, etc.) it will be applied to all of them.

Two, again open multiple images in ACR, but select only one to edit. When done, highlight that images and the ones below by holding down the shift key and apply the "Previous conversion" to them. As a sidenote, you can also apply "Previous conversion" from Bridge or Organizer.

↑"Previous conversion" (left) and "Select all" approach (right).

Output (start using your images)

When done with the conversion, you can either just save your edits and close the image by selecting "Save image" or "Done". This either saves your RAW files in Adobe's Digital Negative Format (DNG) or saves the original RAW file plus whatever edits you have made in an XMP-sidecar file.

↓ DNG (left) and XMP sidecar file (right).

To actually use your images for sharing online, facebook or printing (you know, all the fun stuff), you click "Open image". This launches Elements for further editing or just plain saving as a JPG. Mind you when editing in Elements you are not making changes to the RAW file anymore, but simply to a copy that you can save as JPG or whatever format you prefer.

For the simple stuff (emailing, facebook, etc.) remember to resize the image to around 500-800 pixels on the longest side and lower the quality (scale 1-12) so the image is roughly 100 KB. For printing you do not necessarily have to resize or downgrade the quality, but printing from JPGs is just fine.

↓ Resize (JPG).

↑ Quality (JPG).

Subjectively, Adobe Elements 6 (and newer versions) is one heck of a program. Version 6 and above incorporates the exact same market-leading RAW conversion engine (ACR) as the seven times more expensive Photoshop CS4 does. I personally do a minimal amount of pixel editing, but for the edits I do Elements matches my needs. Granted the more elaborate Photoshop CS4 has a lot (read: a lot a lot) more edit options than Elements. My recommend is to give Elements a try (the first 30 days if downloaded from Adobe is 'on the house'), and if you find yourself needing more editing power, first then consider investing in Photoshop CS4. My bet is most of your needs will be covered by Elements.

↑ RAW files converted and edited in ACR.

For the technically interested: When saving your RAW files ACR presents the option of saving them in 8 bit or 16 bit color depth. What you choose is a personal choice, but keep in mind that most monitors and printers cannot display the additional color depth when going from 8 to 16 bit. Meaning that the image will look exactly the same on your screen and on print. 16 bits obviously takes up more hard drive space, and you have to remember to convert your image to 8 bit within Elements before you can save as JPG. As a reference point 8 bit contains 16,8 millions different colors. DSLRs default shoot in 12 bit color depth. On some cameras you have the option of bumping that up to 14 bit.