Africa Imagery - Photographs of Africa

Adobe Lightroom 3 Adobe Lightroom allows you to get the very best out of your images whether you are dealing with just one or thousands!
We shoot RAW files almost exclusively with our Nikon D3X and D300 and as a consequence we need an efficient, effective, good quality RAW converter. Adobe Lightroom satisfies these requirements and in addition is a very fine Digital Asset Management (DAM) program as well. We sell boxed versions of Lightroom (Contact Us for pricing).
Our Digital Workflow. Most of our images are shot as stock for Africa Imagery Photo Library and we use basically 4 programs in the preparation of images for sale. The primary program is Adobe Lightroom followed by Adobe Photoshop CS4. We find the Viveza plugin for Lightroom very useful and we use Photomatix for the HDR work. On returning from a shoot, our images are either on the Compact Flash cards (we use Lexar Professional 8 gig cards) or on one of 2 USB drives that we've downloaded to in the field. My first step is to re-number the images. The actual name you give them is unimportant – it is just there to give each image a unique number. The file names that cameras dish out are usually limited to a maximum of 9999 and once this is reached it starts again at 1. This can cause HUGE problems with duplicates so it is best to set up your own numbering system. I’ve tried “intelligent” numbers that include date and subject codes but maintaining these is a complete pain and all this data is available in the image EXIF information anyway. I just started at 300 000 and worked up from there. When the images have been renamed I import them into an appropriate folder (you may need to create one if you haven't already got one from a previous import) in Adobe Lightroom as dng files with develop preset and META data settings applied on import. I also generate 1:1 previews at this stage so I don't have to sit there waiting for the file to load when I'm editing. Once the images have been imported I them back them up to 2 separate hard drives. This is critical - backup you images! I then work through the images, selecting the "keeps" making sure that the images are sharp (viewed at 100%) and that the composition and exposure (check the histogram) are good. The rejected images are deleted from the drive. (Remember I have 2 backups) Now the editing work starts in earnest. Every image is checked for exposure, contrast, black clipping, highlight clipping, brightness, chromatic aberration, noise reduction, vignetting, dust spots, colour balance, clarity, vibrancy and saturation. Changes are made as and where necessary. Most of the work is done in Lightroom but if needs be I will edit in Photoshop (for creating panoramas usually), Photomatix (for HDR images) and Viveza if i need to do some local enhancements that are not practical to do in Lightroom. In Lightroom, a suitable caption is added answering the following: What is it? (Including scientific name where appropriate). What is it doing? And where is it doing it? In addition all the other necessary IPTC data is added and/or modified. Again in Lightroom, appropriate keywords are added. I then export low res images for uploading to our image gallery and the edited, captioned and key worded dng files are moved to a high res catalogue ready for export when needed.

Africa Imagery - Photographs of Africa, it's People and its Wildlife

Please note there are no royalty free pictures on this site. All images are © to Africa Imagery's contributing photographers unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved. No reproduction, including copying or saving of digital image files, or the alteration or manipulation of these files, is authorised unless accompanied by a written sales advice issued by Africa Imagery. All images carry a unique embedded digital identifying encryption which cannot be removed by tampering with the IPTC field. This will allow us to track and trace any unauthorized web use. Email us for information on commercial and personal use of images - v2