Printing - Backing Up - Organization
Getting really good prints yourself is tricky. It is a can of worms! There could be a whole class on this and there are classes and books on advanced printing techiques.
You need a photo printer and photo paper and lots of ink. It can be very time consuming and frustrating.
You need a quality printer, quality paper, quality archival inks, monitor and printer calibration, lots of time and patience for anything that rivals a 19¢ print from Walgreens.
For really nice prints use one of the online services or local photo printers.
For fine art quality prints you should get an account with a printer that does that: BayPhoto, WHCC, PhotoCraft are 3 examples. PhotoCraft has a disount program for BDA members.
Organization
Use the computer system's folders to organize for yourself first. Having a working folder and archive folders is important. Keep the originals save for later optimization. Look at this page from my Photoshop Elements class. It has one well thought out example of a good organization.
Good software tools for organization:
On Mac: Photos (does not allow the user to do the initial organization of files with tweaking the preferences!), Picasa, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop and Bridge, Photoshop Lightroom, (does not allow the user to do the initial organization of files with tweaking the preferences!)
On Windows: Windows Photo Gallery, Picasa, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop and Bridge, Photoshop Lightroom
There are others as well; PhotoMechanic, ACDSee, Microsoft Expression Media Studio (used to be iView Media)
3 IMPORTANT THOUGHTS on ORGANZING YOUR IMAGES
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You need a scheme for naming your images!
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You need a scheme for organizing your image folders!
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You should consider the power of key wording (tagging) your images! After considering it you should start doing it right away.
Back Up
Having really great photos is one thing, keeping them forever is another. It is (insert time here), do you know where your backups are? If you seriously want to keep your images forever you must have a scheme for basic back-up! All computer drives will fail at some point.
A good workflow...
- Transfer images from memory card to computer
- Copy images to external backup disk.
- Burn images to CD/DVD optical disc or upload to a cloud account.
- Make sure one backup is off-site.
- Re-format memory card for re-use only after the sequence above.
The 321 strategy from the DAM book says: 3 copies of the data on 2 different media types at 1 remote location