Sunday, March 9, 2008

My Image Import Workflow

Currently my import workflow goes something like this:

  • Put 4GB SDHC card in card reader
  • Open up Pentax Photo Browser, find card in the file browser
  • Select all images
  • Right click and select 'Save as DNG'
  • Select a save destination of a folder on my desktop called 'dng'
  • Wait a while as it churns away
  • When it completes, open up Adobe DNG Converter
  • Select the 'dng' folder for the input
  • Select another folder called 'dng-out' for the output
  • Click 'convert'
  • Wait some more
  • Now open up Lightroom
  • Select 'Import Photos from Disk'
  • Browse to the 'dng-out' folder and select all
  • Continue with a normal Lightroom import

This is a long and tedious process unfortunately :(

After doing all the filesize tests in the last post though, it looks like the difference of 10mb per image doesn't add up. Shooting PEF gives me 169 images on a 4GB card, shooting DNG gives me 168. What's up with that?

I think next time I go out shooting I'll do DNG and convert to the smaller Adobe DNG in the Lightroom import... eliminating everything above between "put card in reader" and "open Lightroom". I think that any differences in download speed would be negated by the fact it's one step and not 15! :)

2 comments:

fozbaca said...

Why not just

Put 4GB SDHC card in card reader
open up Lightroom
Select 'Import'

?

Alan Bailward said...

Because (currently) Lightroom doesn't handle K20D PEF files :( The 1.4 update did work, but it was pulled :( I could shoot DNG but the images are 30% larger than PEF.