<chapter id="work-flow">
  <title>Workflows with &kphotoalbum;</title>
  <para>Workflow is rather important aspect in digital imaging. In this
  chapter we describe different workflows that fit on different needs.
  There are many different factors that must be considered when
  developing a workflow. Hopefully these examples will provide you with
  sufficient ideas of how to tune-up your own method of working with
  digital imaging.</para>

  <sect1 id="raw-workflow">
  <title>RAW workflow using &kphotoalbum; and Bibble5/AfterShot Pro</title>
  <para>When shooting RAW images the files from camera must be developed
  to commonly recognized format like JPEG or TIFF. There are a few
  options to choose from when working on Linux. For example RawTherapee
  and Ufraw are open-source alternatives when Bibble5/AfterShot Pro are
  commercial application for this purpose.</para>

  <para>A few settings are recommended for a RAW workflow.
  First is to enable the using of the embedded thumbnail. This will give
  a tremendous speed boost over decoding each raw file each time they are
  viewed (check also the minimum dimension configuration to ensure decent
  quality). Second one is for the New Image Finder to automatically stack the
  developed versions over the RAW file (developed image must be on same
  directory as the original). This requires regular expressions as
  described in <xref linkend="opt-search-new" />. Two helper scripts are
  provided in &kphotoalbum; sources to help in RAW workflow. These are
  open-raw.desktop and open-raw.pl. The first one enables GUI applications to
  open the RAW files in the open-raw.pl script that tries to find the original
  RAW file and open that instead of the developed image.
  </para>

  <figure id="fig-raw-workflow">
    <title>Sending Images to RAW Editor</title>
    <mediaobject>
      <imageobject>
        <imagedata fileref="raw-external.png" format="PNG"/>
        </imageobject>
      </mediaobject>
  </figure>

  <para>First step in actual workflow is to copy the images from camera to the
  computer. A simple copy on a terminal window is all that is needed:
  </para>
  <screen><userinput><command>cp</command> <option>-a</option> <filename>/media/.../101CANON/</filename> <filename>~/Pictures/2012/sample</filename>
  </userinput></screen>
  <para>
  Then either start &kphotoalbum; or run
  <menuchoice><guimenu>Maintenance</guimenu><guimenuitem>Rescan for
  Images and Videos</guimenuitem></menuchoice>. New images should be
  found and now is time for initially tagging the images. As I usually photograph while
  traveling I first insert the place. Select <guilabel>Folder</guilabel>
  and browse to the new directory. Then go to the
  <guilabel>Show Thumbnails</guilabel>, select all
  and <guimenu>Annotate Multiple Items at a Time</guimenu> or <keycombo
  action="simul">&Ctrl;<keycap>2</keycap></keycombo>. Insert the
  proper place like Finland-Helsinki (see <xref
  linkend="sec-member-groups-in-property-editor"/>).
  </para>

  <para>Now that the new images are easy to find I do the
  initial ranking and deletion. For this I go to the thumbnail
  view and start the Viewer by hitting &Enter;. I use
  rating for good images, just press the appropriate number from
  <keycap>1</keycap> to <keycap>5</keycap>. I only give 3 to 5 ratings
  and hit <keycombo
  action="simul">&Ctrl;<keycap>Del</keycap></keycombo>
  for the bad photos to delete them. At this point I might add also
  People names if there happens to be a diver in the photo. Once the
  first round is done I exit the Viewer by hitting &Esc;
  and select <guimenuitem>Delete file from disk</guimenuitem> to get rid off the
  bad images for good.
  </para>

  <para>Next I select only the images that have high enough rating using
  the search function. Naturally the Place has to be set if search is
  started with <keycombo
  action="simul">&Ctrl;<keycap>F</keycap></keycombo>.
  However, if search is invoked from the Main Window the current
  selection is drilled down to the more precise match. Anyway, at this
  point I go through the better rated images again doing refining on the
  rating. E.g. if I have 5 similar photos of one Nudibranch species I
  generally decrease the rating of the poorer images and might increase
  the best one. Comparing images can be done by selecting the ones you
  want to compare and starting the Viewer. Removing images from the
  Viewer selection can be done with <keycap>Delete</keycap>. This only
  disables the viewing of the current image while within the Viewer,
  nothing is removed or deleted. This allows comparing 2 or 3 better
  images next to each other moving between them with
  <keycap>PgUp</keycap> and <keycap>PgDn</keycap>. I quite commonly use
  a <literal>tmp</literal> category to mark &eg; crabs and shrimps to be
  easily able to display only selected type of images during the later
  phases of selection and identification.</para>

  <para>After a reduced amount of images is left I start tagging them. I
  add the Latin Name of the species and Common Name. Whenever I have
  these two categories completed I consider the image Done and get rid
  of the Untagged marking. Note that if you still need to do tagging
  after developing the RAW image (and auto-stacking them) you need to
  select the top of collapsed stack (or all images on expanded stack)
  and select <emphasis>Annotate Multiple Items at a Time</emphasis> to
  get the whole stack annotated instead of only the topmost
  image.</para>

  <para>The best images are sent to external application for developing.
  With wanted images selected, right click on selected thumbnail and
  select <menuchoice><guimenuitem>Invoke External
  Program</guimenuitem><guimenuitem>All Selected
  Images</guimenuitem><guimenuitem>Send
  Bibble5</guimenuitem></menuchoice>. The application
  selected is actually my script that detects if there is a RAW file for
  the possibly already developed images available and uses that if possible.
  Within the external application I do some tuning up and cropping if
  required and then output the developed JPEGs next to the original RAW file.
  File naming is rather simple, change the extension or add underscore
  and running number if needed.
  </para>

  <para>Now that there is plenty of new JPEGs in the image directories I
  let &kphotoalbum; search for new images and automatically stack the
  new ones on top of the original RAW (<xref linkend="fig-options-file-versions" />).
  Then a final round of selection with the developed images and adding some
  descriptions if needed.</para>

  <para>Final step is to generate static &HTML; pages and upload to my web
  server for the enjoyment of friends and colleagues. This I do with the
  stacks collapsed to only get the developed images to the web page.
  &HTML; generation is described in <xref
  linkend="chp-generating-html"/>.</para>
  </sect1>

  <sect1 id="pano-workflow">
  <title>Panorama workflow</title>
  <para>
  Panoramas require a bit different workflow than normal photo editing.
  This is due to the requirement for multiple source files. The tool of
  choice for panoramas is Autopano Pro but latest version of &digikam;
  should do well and fits zero budget. Following list describes the
  steps required:
  <orderedlist>
  <listitem><para>Tag the photos belonging to a panorama in
  &kphotoalbum; appropriately. This is done mainly to avoid discarding
  images by accident, when sorting out the garbage among the photos
  taken. You probably want also to stack the set of source images at
  this point.</para></listitem>
  <listitem><para>You have at least two simple options for next
  step:
  <orderedlist>
  <listitem><para>You can let Autopano Pro find the panoramas
  automatically from the photo directory.
  </para></listitem>
  <listitem><para>Or send the proper images to Autopano Pro on command
  line to speed things up. This is handy if the image directory contains a
  lot of images, especially RAW ones.  This requires one to fix the script
  that starts Autopano Pro to accept input and to create a desktop file or
  invoking external program with own command line.</para></listitem>
  </orderedlist>
  </para></listitem>
  <listitem><para>If it happens that the resulting panorama is missing a
  small part, you can try to craft it e.g. with the Gimp. Gimp works
  usually quite well if there is enough "structure" to be cloned but there
  is absolutely no guarantee you will get usable
  results.</para></listitem>
  <listitem><para>Save the new image somewhere under &kphotoalbum;'s image
  directory and run
  <menuchoice><guimenu>Maintenance</guimenu><guimenuitem>Rescan for Images
  and Videos</guimenuitem></menuchoice>. This should notice the new
  panorama and include it in the picture gallery.
  </para></listitem>
  <listitem><para>If you have set the AutoStacking of new images properly
  and name of the new panorama matches the rules for this, the panorama
  should be on top of the stack. Otherwise sort the images by date, so the
  new panorama ends up at by the source images and stack them manually.
  (Autopano Pro seems to write the EXIF info of the first image into the
   panorama.)</para></listitem>
  <listitem><para>You can still add tagging at this point to the panorama
  or you might include all the source images also with
  <keycombo>&Ctrl;<keycap>2</keycap></keycombo>.</para></listitem>
  </orderedlist>
  </para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
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