Originally posted by kjg48359 Now that the core of the indoor sports season is just about on me (competitive cheer), I am wondering what kind of options people familiar with editing software would recommend.
Is there any resources that could get me up to speed on a more serious workflow processing than just using Photoshop elements and Premiere elements? I can use GIMP, but for the most part just need to go though about 300 pictures a week quickly and easily (for instance, out of about 300 I'll shrink down about 30 or 40 for posting to the team's facebook site).
Last season I just shot in JPG, and usually regard raw formats as something for more precise portrait and landscape work. For the faster paced sporting shoots, I'm thinking jpg will still be fine.
So as I start to dig into GIMP, I just tried "UFRaw" and after playing with it for a few minutes I'm impressed.
So my real question is: what else is out there that would help? Are there any good resources where the various software packages can be compared? And any "workflow" resources that can help me get more organized?
I'm old enough to have run the B&W darkroom at my college, it's truly amazing how far it's all come in the last 20 or so years!
I've found a few resources comparing open source photo processing and workflow, but they are all (as of last time I looked) woefully out of date and mostly trivial evaluations. I started using UF-Raw, but switched to DigiKam because of it's very good workflow (cataloging, tagging, etc.) capabilities. Added RawTherapee to my routine because it's raw conversion and processing was much better than DigiKam's, but still used DigiKam for workflow.
Finally switched to Darktable, replacing both DigiKam and RawTherapee. Darktable's workflow features nearly match those of DigiKam, except for tagging which is still a bit cumbersome. The Darktable project seems to be in active development so I expect improvements at a better pace than I saw with DigiKam. The raw conversion and developing capabilities of Darktable are very well integrated and documented; RawTherapee may have the edge in some esoteric features, but I found Darktable to have a much more intuitive interface and overall produces better results. I use The Gimp for final editing only when I need edit beyond what Darktable gives, which is pretty extensive.
You might find that using raw is not any slower than jpg with a package like Darktable. You can spend a few minutes tweaking settings for one image, then apply those settings to a batch of images which were taken with similar lighting conditions, for example. The batch processing can run in the background with essentialy no cost in time to your workflow. May not work for your needs, but might be worth considering. I find also that I learn some things that work well in each batch of pictures I develop and with Darktable, it's easy to apply those parameters as a starting point for the next project.