Workflow (Football/Rugby)

alexw9

alexw9

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Hopefully I'm allowed to post this here rather than the pp section, targeted at football/rugby togs mainly but others sports are welcome.

You've just captured team A's goal/try and all the build up just before half time. You want to wire it straight away, you put your CF card into the reader and then...

I'm interested in what software you use (just the one programme or more than one?), Do you copy the images over to your laptop/macbook or do you just load them from the CF card? What settings do you normally apply (have you got presets/saved actions), do you resize the images, what quality do you save the files as (and do you rename them)? What's your captioning process, do you email or ftp the images across?

There's a lot of questions, I know but if your interested in posting a basic step-to-step guide to your usual routine, that would be brilliant and very helpful!
 
Hi Alex

I use Photomechanic to ingest and quickly find the shots i want. If you tag the shots in camera of the goal/try/cele then you can set PM to show only the tagged shots.

I have a shortcut set up in PM that will automatically open the shot in PSE by pressing the "e" key. I run manual/auto levels, auto contrast and if needed run USM. crop and save.

The edited and cropped shot will then be displayed in PM i then apply the Stationary pad (all the info from the agency, kewords, metadata etc) and write the caption.

To write the captions i have code replacements files for each team so for example the caption for Burnleys 2nd goal cele yesterday read

Burnley - Saturday, August 21st, 2010: Burnley's Chris Iwelumo (L) celebrates with Ross Wallace after scoring his 100th career goal during the Npower Championship match at Turf Moor, Burnley. (Pic by Andrew Stunell/Focus Images)
Click to expand...

to write that i would type \bu9\ \c\ with \bu22\ after scoring his 100th career goal etc

then i can right click on the image in PM and either send it by email or FTP
 
I'm a Lightroom user. I wrote up a post on my pitchside workflow here.

Lightroom ingests all my images (there's no "locked images only" ingest) so I tend to suck them in in small batches, or shoot tethered which is very cool. Lightroom applies a pre-set metadata for the match with all the details there including a basic caption on import.

I'll scroll through quickly picking and rejecting pictures from the batch. For the picked ones, I'll crop and adjust as required direct in Lightroom. I then use a text-replacement facility called Phrase Express to put in the player names and the action e.g. "is tackled by" etc into the base caption. Then it's exported at a preset size/resolution and file name & sequence number to a folder on my hard drive where I'll keep all shots from the game.

Then it's a matter of emailing the shots off. Sorted.

If shooting tethered I can get shots away in 2 mins. If not, maybe 4 mins.

I actually like having all the shots on my hard drive as I always cycle through the lot of them a second time at half time and once the game is finished to see if I've missed anything, or there's a shot of a particular player e.g. man of the match, that I can quickly grab and send.
 
I'm also a Photomechanic user. For each game I insert a template. One agency supplies this but create my own if not. This has all the deatails of the agency/copyright/licenced images and my details. I also setup the image and prefix numbers ready for ingesting sraight of the CF cards. Captioning is same as Andy and then open in CS for cropping. I then save edited image in a seperate folder. Back in Photo Mechanic I select the edited image and use the built in ftp adjusting to the correct file size before sending.
 
photomechanic needs a good crop tool :(

as above but a slight time saver.. I shoot tethered if on wire.... tag the pics as I go... then time to send simply copy tagged pics to folder photomechanic is monitoring and away we go... massive time save..
 
My workflow:
Lock good pictures in camera
Ingest in to Photomechanic which automatically adds all the necessary file info
Select tagged pictures only
Add caption details
Drag image over to Photoshop
Edit as needed
Save into a separate folder
Repeat as needed
Upload via our http distributor :)

Very quick and hassle free!
 
Create 3 empty folders on desktop called Transfer, Game, Papers.

Shoot only on 2GB cards (quicker to open and browse later) shoot, then in a quiet moment transfer into transfer folder (remembering to put a blank in the camera) Open Xnview which enables very quick viewing of custon sized thumblail images (mine are 400px wide) select good ones (subjective) and hit alt + A which opens selected files in Photoshop Elements, crop, resize then caption, save into Papers folder.

Transfer all photos from "transfer" folder to game folder which deletes the card ready for the next batch.

Either upload via ftp or email images where theyre going to
 
Rovers_Andy said:
Hi Alex

I use Photomechanic to ingest and quickly find the shots i want. If you tag the shots in camera of the goal/try/cele then you can set PM to show only the tagged shots.

I have a shortcut set up in PM that will automatically open the shot in PSE by pressing the "e" key. I run manual/auto levels, auto contrast and if needed run USM. crop and save.

The edited and cropped shot will then be displayed in PM i then apply the Stationary pad (all the info from the agency, kewords, metadata etc) and write the caption.

To write the captions i have code replacements files for each team so for example the caption for Burnleys 2nd goal cele yesterday read



to write that i would type \bu9\ \c\ with \bu22\ after scoring his 100th career goal etc

then i can right click on the image in PM and either send it by email or FTP
Click to expand...

Cheeky so and so, I told you that!

I do pretty much the same as the other guys in here, but I have custom actions set up on a hotkey in PS CS4. Fn1 is Auto Levels, Auto Contrast. Fn2 is Auto Colour and Fn3 is Unsharp Mask.

Then crop and save in a folder that I call "highres". Back in PhotoMechanic, I caption and then FTP off to the desk.
 
jamesb84 said:
Cheeky so and so, I told you that!

I do pretty much the same as the other guys in here, but I have custom actions set up on a hotkey in PS CS4. Fn1 is Auto Levels, Auto Contrast. Fn2 is Auto Colour and Fn3 is Unsharp Mask.

Then crop and save in a folder that I call "highres". Back in PhotoMechanic, I caption and then FTP off to the desk.
Click to expand...


:D you did indeed and its made a huge difference!
 
Cant believe you guys swap in & out of photoshop and photo mechanic. Seems very complicated to me having different folders everywhere and all.

On a related topic, what size/res do you send pictures into picture desks at?

I usually go for 1500-2000 pixels on the longest edge, 300 dpi and 90% quality, which gives me a file of about 1Mb in size. If the 3G connection is slow, I'll use 1500px long edge, and if on wifi or fast 3G I'll use 2000px long edge.
 
7x5 inch at 300ppi = 2100 x 1500px and about 400-500k file size which is usually about 60% quality.

Tobers said:
Cant believe you guys swap in & out of photoshop and photo mechanic. Seems very complicated to me having different folders everywhere and all.

On a related topic, what size/res do you send pictures into picture desks at?

I usually go for 1500-2000 pixels on the longest edge, 300 dpi and 90% quality, which gives me a file of about 1Mb in size. If the 3G connection is slow, I'll use 1500px long edge, and if on wifi or fast 3G I'll use 2000px long edge.
Click to expand...
 
Tobers said:
Cant believe you guys swap in & out of photoshop and photo mechanic. Seems very complicated to me having different folders everywhere and all.

On a related topic, what size/res do you send pictures into picture desks at?

I usually go for 1500-2000 pixels on the longest edge, 300 dpi and 90% quality, which gives me a file of about 1Mb in size. If the 3G connection is slow, I'll use 1500px long edge, and if on wifi or fast 3G I'll use 2000px long edge.
Click to expand...

It's not that time-consuming or complex once you're used to it. The desk want to punt the livepics out to the papers ASAP so if you're minimising their work it's all the better.

I've been asked to crop to suit and send out at that size. No upscaling or downscaling. It means that my photos can be anywhere from 1500px to 3200px longest edge at native dpi and quality to give between 800kb and 1Mb in size. No matter what upload speed thats what i've been told. I now have 3 options for phone networks as well so if one's going slow (Vodafone and Orange seem VERY bad this season so far) I switch to another (Three are the latest for me)
 
jamesb84 said:
I've been asked to crop to suit and send out at that size. No upscaling or downscaling. It means that my photos can be anywhere from 1500px to 3200px longest edge at native dpi and quality to give between 800kb and 1Mb in size. No matter what upload speed thats what i've been told. I now have 3 options for phone networks as well so if one's going slow (Vodafone and Orange seem VERY bad this season so far) I switch to another (Three are the latest for me)
Click to expand...

That's interesting. If you upload at the native resolution of your camera, you'll end up with a 10MB or so file, so you must be doing something to reduce it to 1MB. If you look at the jpeg that comes out of the camera its 10MB in the case of my 1DIV so if you dont crop, it's one large file that you're trying to send.

So how do you get it to 1MB?
 
Tobers said:
That's interesting. If you upload at the native resolution of your camera, you'll end up with a 10MB or so file, so you must be doing something to reduce it to 1MB. If you look at the jpeg that comes out of the camera its 10MB in the case of my 1DIV so if you dont crop, it's one large file that you're trying to send.

So how do you get it to 1MB?
Click to expand...

Reduce the quality slider in Photo Mechanic...it knackers the quality of the image, but keeps it at high enough resolution for the papers.

I then send in all the original, unedited and uncropped JPEGs the next day so the production team can fiddle with them.
 
Ah - so you aren't downscaling the pixel dimensions of the image, but you are downscaling the quality of the image. That makes sense.
 
Tobers said:
Ah - so you aren't downscaling the pixel dimensions of the image, but you are downscaling the quality of the image. That makes sense.
Click to expand...

Precisely...the quality of the image would be awful if it was printed on anything other than Charmin (AKA Newspaper paper) which is why I/We send originals afterwards...so that if any magazines or commercial clients want to use higher res images, they can do so and they'll be PP'd by the agency.
 
I have to save a low res to ftp for the newspapers, a higher res of the same crop plus send later to the agency both with the original image. Sometimes buyers do ask for originals ....... apparently.
 
jamesb84 said:
Precisely...the quality of the image would be awful if it was printed on anything other than Charmin (AKA Newspaper paper)
Click to expand...

Trust me I'd rather wipe my bum with Charmin than the newspaper paper that we use :D
 
Tobers said:
I'm a Lightroom user. I wrote up a post on my pitchside workflow here.
Click to expand...

Fascinating read mate. Although I'm a long way off using a laptop pitch side, its great to know I can use the same program I'm used to using at home.

Also you've taught me some very handy shortcuts, and i love the tip about applying develop presets on import. Top stuff :thumbs:
 
bigrob said:
Trust me I'd rather wipe my bum with Charmin than the newspaper paper that we use :D
Click to expand...

Well yes, very true. And while we're at it...why can't you get some of that non-smudging ink. Doesn't the Telegraph use it?! It's one of the broadsheets.

Godsend, especially when you're flicking through 8 papers a day
 
It's to save money.....
 
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