As a consequence of restructuring the web site, it has been necessary to reorganise the photo galleries. Sometimes I have done this by merely copying and resizing images; for other galleries I have decided to re-edit images completely. When it came to The Fly Scrubs Up I decided to see how simply I could create a new version of this gallery using Adobe Camera Raw. I was surprised how easy this turned out to be, so I am writing this article to describe my experience.
I used ThumbsPlus to locate the CD on which the original CRW files are stored. There were 31 files, which I copied from CD to a new hard disk folder.
I used BreezeBrowser to briefly review all images (where there any real duffers that could be excluded?) and identify a representative image to use in determining Camera Raw (CR) settings.
I started Adobe Photoshop and opened this image in CR. The shots had been taken with AWB: I adjusted the colour temperature in CR to something I liked and increased exposure by half a stop - CR screenshot.
The final target size for the gallery images is 720 pixels on the long side, so I decided to downsize in CR to 1536 x 1024 (the minimum available) before selecting sharpness settings. I turned smoothness down to 0, and gradually increased sharpness. I got all the way to 100 without noticing any problems, and then added smoothness 20 to reduce background noise a touch. I then saved the CR settings to an CRS file for re-use.
The next step was to create an action for batch use. You can see a screenshot of the action here. As you can see, after saving a PSD of the converted image, I scaled the image to the target 720 pixels, applied a further sharpening with Fred Miranda's D30 CS Pro and added a signature with my signature script. A medium quality JPG was saved using the ProJPEG plug-in.
I reviewed the final JPG's to make the selection for the gallery; two chosen images were a little dark, so I edited the PSD files and recreated the JPG's.
I then used a copy of the 12 images to create thumbnails: a very simple action to downsize using Fit Image and Save As a low quality JPG.
Finally, I used BreezeBrowser to tag the gallery images with EXIF data from the CRW files, and the files were ready for use with my gallery presentation pages.
The whole process didn't take much more than one hour, and much of that was choosing the final 12 images.