Combining "film capture" and "digital capture" in single catalog

[swteven]

Howdy from Texas - This is my first post!


I am in the process of ingesting my entire photo collection into a Lightroom 3 catalog. The photo collection consists of the following:


1 - A "film capture" archive of about 1500 photos. Some of these are layered Master files (PSD) and some are film scans (TIFF). File sizes range from 24mb to 200mb, depending on layering and bit depth.


2 - A "digital capture" archive of proprietary raw files (NEF, CR2). I will likely convert these to DNG during ingestion.


I prefer creating a single Lightroom catalog which contains all my photos so they can all be referenced together.


I am concerned that the very large "film capture" files (PSD and TIFF), even if they are flattened, will bog down the catalog. I am wondering if it would be best to create flattened versions and convert them to a DNG format?


What ingestion workflows have you used in this situation? I welcome all comments and ideas!


Thanks, Scott


See Spectacular Photos of Houston and Texas at http://www.photohouston.com

 

[clee01l]

Welcome from Bellaire! You may get different answers from others, but here is my take on what you are wanting to do. Unless you need to see a full size or do actual develop adjustments or export a derivative, LR will likely not be using your image file after you do the initial import. Lightroom creates a Preview image and unless this gets discarded it will continue to use the preview to show you something on the screen. So the size of the catalof is no a consoderation. LR is only going to store Metadata about your images and the Location of the master image. Soon to be released LR5 will also offer Smart Previews which speed up the preview viewing and manipulation even more.

I don't use layers, so I can't say if it will be necessary to flatten these layered originals. I suspect not.

My standard size NEF is a large 36mp (~40+MB) RAW file. Much smaller than some of your scans. Where you will get bogged down is in generating Previews and to some extent in develop if you use any of the local adjustment brushes. You may want to consider your hardware capabilities, because this and I/O is where the bottleneck will be. I'm running 4 cores and 16GB. My 36MP RAWs are barely small enough to process efficiently. It might be time to upgrade hardware if you are still running OSX 10.7 on a less than state of the technology Mac.

I do not see an advantage to converting to DNG. There may be some advantage to converting to lossy DNG if you are needing portability and cloud functionality. I'm never going to discard my master original RAWs and creating an intermediate DNG and/or lossy DNG does not seem practical for one like me that does not need mobility or cloud processing.

 

[swteven]

Until about 8 years ago, all my work was created with film cameras. The best of these have been scanned and edited in Photoshop. Since these "film capture" files are all Photoshop based, I will probably just return to Photoshop if I require any large scale output.

It may be that all I require in the Lightroom catalog is a lower resolution placeholder that can REFER to the original when necessary and contain metadata for searching the catalog. If the file has enough detail for a small print that will likely be adequate for any output in Lightroom.


Cletus - thanks for your quick reply and welcome from Spring Branch!


Thanks, Scott

 

[Hal P Anderson]

Scott,

Welcome!

Importing large files to lightroom won't make it slower except when actually doing things with those images (editing or exporting). Also, if you don't Copy the images when you import them (use Move or Add, instead), they won't take up any extra room on disk (although their previews will take up some).

So there isn't much, if any, of a downside to importing your scans into Lightroom. I'd just import them and send them to Photoshop for further editing via Edit In (choosing to send them without LR edits, which you evidently won't be making anyway).

Hal

 

[clee01l]

...It may be that all I require in the Lightroom catalog is a lower resolution placeholder that can REFER to the original when necessary and contain metadata for searching the catalog.

That lower resolution placeholder IS the Preview. You have choices as to what size and quality standard preview to create and whether to create a 1:1 preview along with the retention period.

As Hal has pointed out, using the Move or Add import option won't significantly increase the storage needs

 

[Jim Wilde]

And just to clarify the thing about layers. If you import a layered file (PSD or Tiff) into Lightroom, the layers are preserved. You cannot see the layers in Lightroom (you see the top layer, obviously), but they are retained so if you then "edit in PS" the fully-layered file is passed over. So no need to flatten prior to import unless you are concerned about disk space, which I personally wouldn't be.

 

[swteven]

As I mentioned, my legacy "film capture" files have been edited and saved as PSD.


Frequently I create a black & white version in photoshop and save it as a derivative of the original color master file. In this situation I assume I will also have to import the black & white file into LR as a unique file.


Scott

 

[clee01l]

As I mentioned, my legacy "film capture" files have been edited and saved as PSD.


Frequently I create a black & white version in photoshop and save it as a derivative of the original color master file. In this situation I assume I will also have to import the black & white file into LR as a unique file.


Scott

If your B&W is a derivative export of the LR cataloged copy, you can catalog the derivative B&W on export with
settings in the Export dialog. I would not catalog exports. Instead, I would make a virtual copy of the color original and Export or print from that VC. The VC will only add metadata to the catalog and retain a Preview in the Preview folder. Any future requirements for the B&W can be generated by reexporting or printing the from the information stored in the LR VC.

 

[DaveS]

For the derivative black and white, unless you have a need to have a fully layered black and white copy of the original or prefer to do the conversion in Photoshop (possibly with a plugin), all you have to do is create a virtual copy in LR and go to the develop panel in lightroom and do a black and white conversion. It won't duplicate the colour image, just leave instructions in LR on the conversion. You will see what appears to be a second copy of the file but in black and white. That can then be exported to a file if you need to send it somewhere. There is nothing to re-import.

Edit- Once again beaten to the punch by the knowledgeable chaps on this forum.

 

[swteven]

I think I understand what you guys are suggesting...


However, I often carefully craft my Photoshop edits of BW derivatives from a color file that originated from film.


When I start with a "digital capture" RAW file I will try the virtual copy derivative of the color original


Question:
Is a "virtual copy" a function of LR or just another way of saying a LR preview?


What do you mean by a "derivative export of the LR cataloged copy" ?


I have much to learn about the new options available to me in LR, especially terminology.


Scott

 

[Hal P Anderson]

Scott,

A virtual copy is a different set of stored metadata and edits than the metadata and edits that are stored for the original image. All those edits and metadata are stored in the catalogue, and each VC has its own preview. The amount of data that defines the VC is quite small compared to the amount of data in the actual image, so they are much, much cheaper in disk space than having a separate image file. You can have as many Virtual Copies of an image as you want.

A derivative export is an image derived from what you see in Lightroom that you export to fulfill some non-Lightroom purpose such as printing, displaying on the Web, or emailing to a friend. When you export an image, you can change its size, add sharpening appropriate to its use, or do a number of other one-off modifications. Think of the image in Lightroom as a negative and the exported file as a print.

Hal

 

[swteven]

I get it now! I can see how the virtual copy would be cheaper in terms of overall disk space

I also see that a derivative export is repurposed output, say to a web gallery, which is one of my later goals after developing the LR catalog.

Thanks Guys!