Return to Pixlabs' HomePixlabs - Smart Digital Photography Software

 

Up

Digital Photo Reference
Photo Management
Microsoft .NET FAQ
Site Map

Home

 

 

Photo Management

The current set of utilities are simple to use but very powerful.  Here are a few sample uses of some of the uses of digital photo utilities.

Managing Your Workflow

One of the confusing things about digital photography for newcomers is that of managing the images after the pictures have been taken.  The "workflow" or process of working with images from exposure to final product can be daunting.  Here are some tips that we recommend.

Phases of a typical workflow.

  1. Download
  2. Sort and Lossless Manipulation
  3. Store
  4. Lossy Manipulation
  5. Output

One of the powerful features of DPU is that it allows you to set up common, uncommon or complex actions once and use them as often as you like without have to rediscover your technique each time.  You can configure your workflow with just a few actions and the rest is as easy as drag and drop.

Download

When you download your images from your camera we recommend that you move them to a temporary location where you can work with them. 

bulletIf your camera or flash media reader provides you with a removable storage, "virtual disk drive" on your computer, you can use a DPU action to move the images from your flash media to your temporary directory on your hard disk where you will do your preliminary editing.  If your action moves the images rather than just copying them, this single action will download your images and clear your flash media so it will be ready to take more pictures.

Lossless Manipulation and Organization

After you have the images on your computer, we recommend that you perform any operations your would like to help you organize your image.  The types of operations you may want to perform include, deleting images that you don't want to keep, lossless rotation of images, renaming files etc.  If you are careful to maintain image quality and not lose information (for example don't resize now) you can maximize the quality and amount of information that you store.  You never know when this will be important in the future.

bulletUse DPU to rotate your images without any loss of image quality or metadata (EXIF) information.
bulletDPU can help you to rename your images by date and also organize them in a date based hierarchy for easy retrieval later.
bulletUse DPU to organize your images by session to group images from a particular event or activity together.
bulletUse DPU to help you easily add information from copyright information to location information to your images.
bulletWatch for future utilities that help you to quickly and efficiently choose the images you want to keep and discard.

Store

The images are now ready for storage.  You can create a set of directories on your hard disk, or burn a CD ROM if you like.  Because you haven't done anything destructive to the image yet, these stored images will be the most useful and flexible in the future.

bulletUse DPU to move your images from your temporary working directory to a more permanent location
bulletDPU can be used to copy images to a backup location such as a CD ROM or server
bulletWatch for future products that help you to browse, organize and retrieve just the pictures you want.

Lossy Manipulation

Depending on the final product you have in mind, you may want to resize, crop, or otherwise manipulate your images to make them appropriate for your purpose.  Because these actions forever change the image, we recommend that you store the image permanently before you do these types of edits just in case you want to use the image for another purpose in the future.  For complex manipulation of images a good photo editor (such as PhotoShop) is indispensable. 

bulletDPU can copy images automatically to a working folder so that you wont accidentally overwrite your original images.
bulletDPU can be used to easily create high quality, resized images with a variety of different options
bulletDPU can be used to add captions and watermarks to images..
bulletWatch for future utilities to help with cropping and other common actions.

Output

There are a  variety of potential outputs for your images.  Below are a few of the most common ones.

  1. Print
    bulletWatch for future products to help you easily print images just the way you want them.
  2. Email
    bulletUse DPUs Mailer feature to send one or more images to an
  3. Web Page
    bulletUse DPU to make thumbnails and reduced resolution images for faster downloads for web pages
    bulletUse DPU to create complete web galleries of your images
  4. Viewer/Screen Saver
    bulletWatch for future products to give you new options for viewing your images in novel and interesting ways

Back Home Up Next