Photo Mechanic browser window for St. Louis Fashion Week edit.

What’s the best photographic workflow for a newspaper photojournalist? We could go back and forth for hours on that question, and everyone here in the photo department would have a different answer. There might be a rough outline of what to do — the P-D buys a copy of Photo Mechanic browser software and Adobe Photoshop for each computer– and you figure out how best to use it to accelerate your production and delivery of photographs to editors and readers.

A lot of us learned a workflow early in our careers. For some, like Post photogs JB Forbes, David Carson, or Robert Cohen, they grew up shooting film (negatives and slides) for the paper and processing them on deadline. Some of the younger photogs (not saying the trio mentioned before are old, just saying!) learned digital at a much earlier point in their careers. I started in film, developing black and white in a darkened bathroom of my mom’s house during high school, and eventually moved toward color negative film and digital in my first two internships.

It was easy then. You developed the film, scanned it into the computer, captioned it using Photoshop, and dropped it into the archive. Then, when Nikon released the (what I consider to be the most affordable at the time) D1 digital camera and I picked up one late in my first internship, all of a sudden there were dozens of image browser software selections, plug-ins for Photoshop, and tools to batch process images. Not only was it a bewildering array of choices, but also at that time there wasn’t a lot of direction other than Rob Galbraith’s old digital guide using the antiquated NC2000 & DCS series cameras.

We’ve come a long way since but the routine has been relatively the same. Typically, now I use the Photo Mechanic software to ingest (download from the camera) and caption the images into a folder. Then I select my favorites, color correct them in Photoshop, and drop them in the server. Lately, however, I’ve been giving Adobe Lightroom software a try, where images are cataloged via database and indexed into separate folders. Instead of opening a file and resaving it through Photoshop, Lightroom creates a mathematical script that indicates what color or tonal corrections I’ve made and references it to a specific image. Technically, you never touch the raw file, and you have a wealth of choices and options at your disposal. Nevertheless, learning a new workflow after laying the foundation of one routine years ago makes for a dismal transition. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older (I did get a stronger glasses prescription last year…), or maybe it’s a denial thing (if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it), but I struggle to adapt to new workflows. The inherent problem I face now is the folders upon folders of years of newspaper photos. I save them in multiple places, multiple drives, all in the effort to back up and protect my most valuable photographic assets. Lightroom might be the answer, but it’s going to take more time and concentration to undo years of consecutive routine.