Alaska Photo Graphics - Digital Workflow

Digital Workflow

The universe that is digital workflow could possibly be described in two competing textbook series, each disagreeing on every point with the other, and yet both would be correct.

Our digital workflow, from a greatly simplified perspective, begins with shooting in the RAW format.

Verses the popular jpeg or tiff file formats, RAW offers many advantages. It records the data exactly as it comes from the camera’s imaging sensor, and no processing is applied. This means that as long as the original RAW file is available, the maximum possible detail and quality may be extracted from that file. Color balance can be chosen after the image is taken, while evaluating the scene on a large, color corrected monitor.

Raw files are not viewable without special software, so we must convert them to a format viewable on our website and also publishable or printable for sale. We use Adobe Photoshop for this conversion process and all color correction and other required digital work.
Once all photos from a specific trip or assignment have been color corrected and fixed as necessary, they are key-worded and captioned for the web and our records, burned to DVD for backup, saved to our redundant storage array, ripped to web resolution, and uploaded to our website.

The Workstations

Our digital studio includes our web test server which also locally hosts client assignment shoots, a file server, and two Windows based workstations. The workstations have similar specifications, optimized for image workflow:

Image Storage

Digital photography introduces a challenge in file management and storage. We have over 15,000 images either natively digital or scanned from film. Many are over 50 megabytes, and some large panoramas are nearly 2 gigabytes! For speed and workflow efficiency, our images are stored directly on our fast workstation, and accessable over a gigabit network. A nightly backup to an Infrant ReadyNAS file server ensures data security.

The file server has 1.6 Terabytes (That's 1.6 trillion bytes, or 1600 gigabytes) of storage, spanned across four drives in such a way that 1200 gigabytes are available, and any one drive may fail with no loss in data.

For additional data redundancy, our images are also burned to DVD after each shoot. Finally, we do a monthly backup to external hard drives which are stored off-site.

Printers

We produce all our prints digitally using Epson UltraChrome K3 pigment based inks on a Premium semimatte paper, which offers saturated colors and rich blacks with a low glare surface. This is the ideal printing platform, offering superior color, sharpness, and longevity when compared to traditional methods. It also enables us to provide fast turnaround, often shipping custom, hand-made prints the day after the order.

We print primarily on the Epson Stylus Pro 7800, which enables 24" wide printing at a virtually unlimited length.

When properly cared for and displayed under glass, our prints will last a lifetime.