What do you guys recommend?

[slimla]

Hello a fairly new canon forum user! I currenly shoot headshots for actors in Los Angeles

I have a few questions and would love to hear your opinions feedback

1. I use a macbook and I have iphoto on it. when i load my pictures off my card using my sandisk USB imagemate iPhoto opens up and all the images go there. Which is fine but i use an external hard drive to save my photos. It can be rather laborious as after I load them i have to drag all the photos to the external hard drive folder titled headshots. Is there another program you guys recommend or if you also use iphoto is there a way to set it so all the images will go to my external hard drive? (ive already searched preferences to no avail).

A few worries. Since I am shooting in RAW will iphoto degrade the quality somehow? is there a more efficient way?

2. when my images are put in iphoto they are titled .jpg. Now I am recently shooting RAW and I wasnt sure if RAW is .jpg but just a large picture.

3. What is the best way to give my clients their images on dvd? I dont know how to reduce the size of all the images at once from the huge .jpg (raw) file to a smaller size so they can go their the dvd and pick the final choices (also if they want to print them up on 4x6 so they see the images. I'm guessing 800 pixels x whatever the width would be?

4. For those of you photographers who have a very NICE website. would you be able to recommend a way to do it or a cheap but great web designer. or even a template. I have iWeb on my computer but the quality is not as nice as the other websites Ive seen out there

5. when you are saving a picture for people to see on your website what format do you save your images in? I heard its .bmp that will give internet the best image to see

[slimla]

I realized this is soo much to ask. I'm full of questions!

[DerekSimon]

A lot of questions, hopefully I can help you out some.

#1 - I too have a Macbook Pro and can honestly say I have never used iPhoto for anything besides for extremely quick on the go shots. I would recommend either upgrading to Lightroom or Photoshop CS4 by Adobe. Both of these applications allow you to edit your work beyond believe and with some tinkering your will be able to quickly save files to an external HDD.

#2 - Once again, I am not too familiar with iPhoto so I cannot comment on how it labels file extensions. I will let you know this, there is a difference between RAW and .jpg. RAW files will have a different extension as opposed to JPG's. Definately check your camera settings and ensure you really are shooting in RAW format.

#3 - Maybe avoiding the whole issue with working DVD's would be best. I would recommend setting up your own website and providing your clients with a login page and individual information maybe be more beneficial. Later on down the road after the approve the proof's then you can either make prints or create DVD's. I would suggest handling prints yourself, simply because what you could provide them woulld look entirely more professional than what they could obtain.

#4 - I have a website, but it is far from nice as you describe. I am in the process of authoring and editing a new page, but until then my current one will have to work. If this is your first forray into a website I would recommend skip finding a web designer simply to avoid cost. templates are much cheaper and really not that hard to work with yourself. There are numerous sites that sell templates, I would recommend finding either an all HTML based template or if you do desire FLash, look for a Flash CMS or Flash XML based template due to their ease of editing. Becareful with using Flash because it isn't as friendly as it could be with search engines and will result in hurting your SEO campaigns. End result will be a loss of exposure from potential customers.

#5 - I really have heard but in my few years of web design and photography. To be completely honest, I do not see any specific benefits to choosing one over the other unless you see an issue. Just post some shots and test for yourself to see if you can see any significant differences.

Sorry if my answers were somewhat short but I didn't want to overly bore you. I am sure you still may have some more questions in regards to what I have shared. If you do either post them on here or simply PM me and I would be more than willing to help you out. I understand how confusing all of this can be because at one point I was at the same stage you were. Hopefully this will provide you with some answers though. If you need I can give you some links to template companies as well as website hosting companies that are really reliable and have excellent customer support also. I don't want to post all of that in this thread because it could be taken as advertising. Just let me know. Have a great day.

[slimla]

A lot of questions, hopefully I can help you out some.

#1 - I too have a Macbook Pro and can honestly say I have never used iPhoto for anything besides for extremely quick on the go shots. I would recommend either upgrading to Lightroom or Photoshop CS4 by Adobe. Both of these applications allow you to edit your work beyond believe and with some tinkering your will be able to quickly save files to an external HDD.

#2 - Once again, I am not too familiar with iPhoto so I cannot comment on how it labels file extensions. I will let you know this, there is a difference between RAW and .jpg. RAW files will have a different extension as opposed to JPG's. Definately check your camera settings and ensure you really are shooting in RAW format.

#3 - Maybe avoiding the whole issue with working DVD's would be best. I would recommend setting up your own website and providing your clients with a login page and individual information maybe be more beneficial. Later on down the road after the approve the proof's then you can either make prints or create DVD's. I would suggest handling prints yourself, simply because what you could provide them woulld look entirely more professional than what they could obtain.

#4 - I have a website, but it is far from nice as you describe. I am in the process of authoring and editing a new page, but until then my current one will have to work. If this is your first forray into a website I would recommend skip finding a web designer simply to avoid cost. templates are much cheaper and really not that hard to work with yourself. There are numerous sites that sell templates, I would recommend finding either an all HTML based template or if you do desire FLash, look for a Flash CMS or Flash XML based template due to their ease of editing. Becareful with using Flash because it isn't as friendly as it could be with search engines and will result in hurting your SEO campaigns. End result will be a loss of exposure from potential customers.

#5 - I really have heard but in my few years of web design and photography. To be completely honest, I do not see any specific benefits to choosing one over the other unless you see an issue. Just post some shots and test for yourself to see if you can see any significant differences.

Sorry if my answers were somewhat short but I didn't want to overly bore you. I am sure you still may have some more questions in regards to what I have shared. If you do either post them on here or simply PM me and I would be more than willing to help you out. I understand how confusing all of this can be because at one point I was at the same stage you were. Hopefully this will provide you with some answers though. If you need I can give you some links to template companies as well as website hosting companies that are really reliable and have excellent customer support also. I don't want to post all of that in this thread because it could be taken as advertising. Just let me know. Have a great day.


Thank you for your helpful response.

#1. I do have photoshop CS4 but when im uploading my images I want them basically to be saved to my external harddrive without having to open up photoshop unless photoshop has some neat thing that I dont know about that will help me with this.

So are you saying you open up photoshop and when you are uploading your images they go straight through photoshop?


#2 well i looked at my camera and it says I'm shooting in raw but when they go to iphoto (im just using iphoto to transfer) the images say .jpg.... hmm

#3 thank you this will be in the works then! and great idea to help people to go to your site anyways friends etc will go to see if their friend gives the password to view their images!

#4 absolutely correct I'm going to avoid flash and go html. I know about SEO and yes you are right Flash is not helpful beautiful but not helpful to find.

#5 thanks!

[antricacy]

1. I only use iPhoto to load photos from my point & shoot camera. For "nicer" pictures coming from my DSLR, I load them from RAW (a lossless format for pictures) into Adobe Lightroom. Think of Lightroom as a fancier iPhoto for photographers.

4. I would offer my services to you as I am a freelance web designer with field experience, but because I am in college also, I haven't had much time to finish up my portfolio site. If you're still interested later this summer, I can contact you and work with what you would like to achieve from your website along with teaching you how to maintain it.

5. Do NOT save photos as .bmp for web. They require a lot of space and will not load as fast. I would suggest "optimizing" your photos in JPEG for web with Adobe Photoshop at 60-80%.

From these questions, it sounds like you are a novice at web, photo, and computers. I would recommend picking up a few books such as The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby (http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Photography-Book-Scott-Kelby/dp/032147404X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240806856&sr=8-1) and similar books alike. It should go over basic photo editing techniques and software.

Best of luck to you!