Also, I’ve included the actual demo I put together here: Shrugh and I’ve zipped all of the files including the balsamiq source and made it available here: BalsamiqDemosDemo.zip.

Hopefully that will help everyone!

cheers,

EG

Hopefully this will help some people get started. Please note, the end of the article is incomplete. However, you really should be able to figure out how to complete assembly based on the instructions and photos. At some point, I will complete this and republish.

Cheers!

Given the large response (believe it or not!) I had to that post, I decided to write an article for the Webzine Power Fibers covering the same topic with a lot more detail and full color photographs.

Power Fibers is published quarterly by Todd Talsma and the new edition (Issue 36) came out today. Power Fibers is available as an annual subscription on CD but Todd also makes the current issue freely available until the next issue is published. Todd gave me permission to place a copy of my article here: Horeshair_Fly_Lines_PowerFibers_Issue_36.

To date, I’ve made several wooden fly rods (primarily using the beautifully lettered and illustrated book “Making Strip-Built Fly Rods from Various Woods on a Lathe” by John Betts) with handmade guides and reel seat hardware, hooks and flies, and several small brass reels. The final item to complete my early fishing equipment was the fly line itself. Many of the early accounts go in to detail about procuring and making horse-hair fly lines. Darrel Martin describes and illustrates several methods to make these lines in his excellent “The Fly-Fisher’s Craft, The Art and History“. I’ve made short (6′-9′) lines using these methods using both Mr. Martin’s descriptions and interpretation as well as the original citation. These include:

1. The “Treatyse Jig” as it is called to furl short lengths of hair in to snoods that are knotted together
2. A Walton’s Engine (twisting machine) that I designed and built of brass – again to furl snoods that are knotted together
3. The Williamson Quill Twister to furl snoods that are knotted together
4. Plaiting (braiding) to create a knotless, tapered line

While all of these lines are functional I was not quite satisfied with the final product. Lines constructed using the techniques in 1 and 2 are the best of these but suffer from having a knot every 30″ or so that can hang up in the rod’s guides. They are quick and easy to construct though and wrapping the knot with silk thread helps somewhat. The Quill Twister does not twist the individual strands as tightly as the above methods so the furled snood is looser and prone to unwinding. It does, however, excel at twisting 3 single strands of horse-hair together to make leaders. Finally, the plaited line is very time consuming to construct but does result in a knotless, tapered line. The texture of the braid is very rough though and the line itself is flat – more like a ribbon than a line. This can be somewhat corrected by reducing the hair count in one of the 3 strands.

Then, several weeks ago I found an old book in the Google collection that I had not seen referenced previously. “British Rural Sports: Comprising Shooting, Hunting, Coursing, Fishing, Hawking, Racing, Boating, Pedestrianism, and the Various Rural Games and Amusements of Great Britain” by Stonehenge, published in 1867. A woodcut on page 265 shows a new device for creating continuously tapered, furled, knotless fly lines from horse-hair! The description on page 265 (for some reason the Plate and text pages are numbered the same) is quoted here:

“Reel-Lines are made of horse-hair (from the tail), of silk, or silk and hair mixed, of Indian-weed, and of silkworm gut. It is usual for the amateur fisherman to purchase these lines, which are made by a small machine, but sometimes the angler prefers making them himself, and if at all handy, he may do this with great advantage by the following mode, which is much superior to the twisting-machine, because it admits of the introduction of fresh hair with much greater facility.

In Making the horse-hair line, first procure a quantity of good hair, which may be bought at the shops ; but if it can be obtained from a good young chestnut horse with a flaxen-tail so much the better. When such a horse is docked, a considerable portion of his tail with the hair attached is removed, and that is the very best for the present purpose. A grey horse with a silver mane will give white hair, which requires staining, but the colour of the flaxen mane is as good as any art can give. Young hair is twice as string as the milk-white hair, which is peculiar to old horses. Next procure three pieces of strong goose-quill, each about half an inch long, and fit loosely into them three pieces of deal three or four inches long ; then divide your hair intended for your line into three equal portions ; thus, if your line is to be of eighteen hairs altogether, then let each of your quills receive six, leaving about four inches projecting ; then push in the sticks gently, and ties the loose ends together, as shown in the annexed woodcut (fig. 1). The knot formed by the union of the three divisions is to be attached to some fixed object by a pin ; then take out each stick, one after the other, and pass the quill up to within an inch of the knot, replace the stick, and take two of them in the left hand. The remaining stick is to be gently twisted from right to left, and when sufficiently so, passed over the other two also from right to left, when it should be grasped by the left hand, gently keeping up a slight strain upon the knot. At this time the three are in the position shown in the woodcut ; then let the angler take hold of a d, draw it towards him about a quarter of an inch, allowing the hair to slip through the space between quill and wood ; twist it as before, and pass it over to the left. Repeat this with b e, and then with c f, when a b will again occupy the same position as at first. By carrying on this process a line may soon be turned out of great strength, and of any degree of tightness of twist ; but if too tight, it will be liable to be entangled, or to kink, as it is generally called. As soon as the angler has mastered this part of the process, and has twisted a few inches of line, he must divide the remaining length of his hair into the same number of portions as he has hairs in his line and cut off one hair at each of these lengths, so that he may spice his line regularly throughout its whole length. As soon as one of these cut ends appears loose above the head of the quill, the stick must be removed, and another hair of full length inserted and twisted in with the rest, and so on with every succeeding break. In this way the line appears, when finished, to be furnished with a series of projecting hairs, but these may be removed without danger with a knife, or scissors, or a taper, previously soaking the whole line for twenty-four hours in water. The line may also be gradually reduced in size at the pleasure of the maker, by omitting to insert fresh hairs. By this mode all links and joints are avoided, and the line is everywhere within one hair of the full strength with which it would be furnished if joined in links in the ordinary way.”

Now, let me interpret that for you! I had to read this passage many times, refer to the woodcut and try out each step before I got the true meaning. First, obtain your horse-hair. Contrary to this recommendation, I use white hair (not from an old horse) from a stallion. The woodcut and description of the goose-quill sections is straight forward. Finding goose quills in New England is pretty easy! Cut off the tips of the quill, back to the point where the shaft is fairly straight. Then cut off a 1/2″ section. These quills have a white foam-like material in them that must be removed. I used a 1/8″ drill bit and simply pushed it through the quill section with my fingers. Then spin the drill with your fingers to clean out the material. I used goose quills for my first line but used small pieces of plastic tubing (soda straws) for my second. I am working on a “high tech” version of this idea using aluminum tubes split lengthwise so a hair can be easily introduced and a foam plug to hold the hair and provide just the right amount of friction… but read on.

It took a little googling to determine what “three pieces of deal three or four inches long” meant. Deal, as it turns out, is an old term for for or pine wood. So, this means to use 3 pine sticks about 3″ long. The stick needs to fit into the quill snugly in order to hold the hair, but not too snugly. These sticks should be round and the last 1″ or so tapered to fit the quill. Here is a photo of the sticks fitted in to the quills:

I wanted a line that contained 18 hairs at the butt end and tapered to 3 hairs, approximately 25′ long. That means that each of the 3 strands will start with 6 hairs and taper down to 1. To make this taper, you need to remove 5 hairs over 25′ on each strand. That calculates to 5′ of 6 hairs, 5′ of 5 hairs, 5′ of 4 hairs, … down to 5′ of 1 hair. My tail hair is about 34″ long but after trimming the tips to remove frays and weak areas, comes out to about 30″ long. So, 2 hair lengths will make 5′. I love it when things work out like this.

One thing this account did not mention is to align 1/2 of the hairs in each strand the opposite direction – so, if there are 6 hairs in the strand take 3 of them and turn them end-for-end so their tip ends align with the butt ends of the other 3 hairs. Horse tail hair tapers significantly from the butt to tip – the thin tip section being the weakest. By realigning 1/2 the hairs in this way, you even out the final diameter of the section as well as redistribute the weaker tip sections so they lie next to butt hair sections. Almost every other horse-hair line making description points this out, so maybe it was considered “known art” in this description.

The description of getting started makes sense if you’ve ever furled a rope, line or leader. After inserting the strands (6 hairs each) in to the quills and locking them in place with the wooden pegs, you tie their ends together. This knot is then held so it does not spin as you furl the line. I used my fly tying vise and gently clamped the knot in its jaws – but a nail or push pin works well too. Next, hold 2 sticks in your left hand and the other in your right hand. The instructions call for twisting the stick in your right hand from right to left to impart a twist on the hair. However, right to left clockwise or counterclockwise? Looking up from the bottom of the stick, the rotation should be clockwise. This imparts the standard “rotate, counter rotate” twists required to furl. It is also important to twist enough to give a good furl but not so much as to “entangle or kink” the strand. I find that 3 twists per 1/4″ length of hair is about right. You’ll know when you’ve twisted too much. Follow the recipe of twisting the stick in your right hand, then pass it over the top of the other 2 sticks in your left hand. (Looking from the bottom, this would be a counterclockwise rotation.) Hold the left most 2 in your left hand and  the other in your right. Repeat. You’ll find that it goes pretty quickly. Each time you place a new stick in your right hand, you pull it towards yourself (away from the knot) to let about 1/4″ of hair come out of the top of the quill – that is why the sticks need to be a loose fit. If they are too tight in the quill, you will not be able to pull the hair out without breaking it.

The next challenge comes after you’ve furled about 4″ of line. Just when you get the hang of it, you need to stop and stagger-cut the hair. The description takes a little explanation;

“he must divide the remaining length of his hair into the same number of portions as he has hairs in his line and cut off one hair at each of these lengths, so that he may spice his line regularly throughout its whole length. As soon as one of these cut ends appears loose above the head of the quill, the stick must be removed, and another hair of full length inserted and twisted in with the rest, and so on with every succeeding break.”

The intent is to stagger the ends of each hair in each strand so that when you need to “introduce” new hair, you add 1 hair at a time. This eliminates any weak points in the line if 2 or more hairs needed to be spliced in at the same place. Assume the hair is 30″ long and there are 6 hairs per strand – 18 hairs total – and that you’ve furled 6″. Simply divide 24″ by 18 hairs to get 1 1/3″. Now, you need to leave 1 hair full length, cut 1 1/3″ off all of the remaining hairs. Leave one of those at the new length and cut 1 1/3″ off all of the remaining hairs. Continue this process until you have 18 hairs progressively shorter by 1 1/3″. In practice, I think you need to also stagger the cuts across the strands to help distribute the splices within a strand. Here’s how I do it:

I lay the 3 sticks and quills out side by side in front of me with the hair draping over the edge of a table. Starting with the strand on the left, I leave one hair alone and cut all of the others 4″ shorter (3 * 1 1/3″ = 4″). I pull out one of these and cut the remainder 4″ shorter. Continue this process on this single strand until all 6 hairs are progressively 4″ shorter than their neighbor. Now, move to the middle strand. On this one, you cut 1 1/3″ off ALL hairs. Then, leave one of these alone and cut 4″ off all of the remainders. Pull one of these out and cut the remaining hairs 4″ shorter. Repeat this on the middle strand until all 6 hairs have been cut and are progressively 4″ shorter than their neighbor. Now, take the right-most strand and cut 2 2/3″ off all the hairs. Pull one out and cut 4″ off all of the remaining hairs. Pull one of these aside and cut 4″ off the remainders. Repeat until all 6 hairs have been cut and each hair is progressively 4″ shorter than its neighbor.

Now, look at the mess you created! The cut off sections of hair can be thrown away. What remains are 18 hairs divided into 3 strands and no 2 are the same length. Also, you will notice that within a strand, the hairs lengths are evenly cut at 4″ intervals. Here is a graphic to illustrate:

From this point it is pretty straightforward. You need to introduce a new hair when the end of a hair comes out of the quill. Except, remember, you want to taper the line from 18 to 3 hairs. Since we already know that we need to furl 5′ of length for each set of hairs (18, 15, 12, 9, 6, 3), simply continue replacing hairs until you have completed 5′. At this point, when the end of a hair in a strand appears, do not add a new hair. When the second end emerges later, that’s when you add the new hair (the strand will now have 5 hairs in it). You need to skip adding a single hair on each of the 3 strands. You could simply skip the first hair end that appears in each of the 3 strands. I did that for my first line and it looks fine. But if you think about it, doing so results in the line dropping from one increment (18 hairs) to the next (15 hairs) over a distance of 2 2/3″. I thought it would be better to smooth this transition out so the line transitions from 18 hairs to 17 hairs for 1′ to 16 hairs for another foot to 15 hairs. To do this, simply skip 2 ends on one of the 2 remaining strands and 4 on the other. You could get carried away and create even a smoother transition, but from a strength standpoint, I think about a foot is good. Once you get down to 1 hair per strand, it is harder to twist and furl the line. Be persistent but do not over twist.

Once you reach the final length, tie a knot in the end and clip the hairs to even them up. Starting from the thin end, carefully let the line coil around your hand as you coil it up in to about a 4″ diameter. Don’t stretch it or pull on the loose hairs that appear every 1 1/3″ or so. Place the coil in a bowl or jar filled with water and let it soak over night. The next day, remove it. Starting with the fat end, carefully uncoil the line and use a fine pointed scissors or single edge razor blade to carefully clip the protruding hairs that jut out every 1 1/3″. Do not stretch the line. When the protruding hairs have all been clipped, you need to let the line air dry. I found that coiling it loosely in a 4″ coil and simply laying it on a clean plate in my shop does the trick.

The last step is to make a loop at each end of the line. I like to simply make a bend in the line and bind it down with fine silk thread. Here is the end result:

25′ tapered (18 hairs to 3 hairs), knotless, furled horse-hair fly line

Close-up of furled horse tail hair fly line

You can modify the above to create any length, taper, and thickness of line you need. It doesn’t take a long time to make a horse-hair line in this way and the results are quite pleasing.

This photo was taken the day before my wedding on Nov. 10, 1989. My brother flew over from Germany (he was stationed in Mainz) and my Mom & Dad came to Boston for my wedding. My mom took this photo with a little point & shoot ASP camera in Faneuil Hall in Boston. It is my Dad’s favorite photo so when I was visiting earlier this year I sneaked into his office and scanned the photo. The print was 3.5″ by 5″ and not in the world’s best shape. The scanner was my dad’s and not profiled, but I did the best I could!

Here is the scan of the original photo:

You can immediately see some of the challenges:

• lots of dust speckles and scratches
• print grain
• cyan cast in the lighter colored buildings and pavers
• blue fringe around the tree branches
• blown-out sky
• poor exposure

My mission, to fix as many of the above problems as possible and create a 5″ by 8″ print, frame it, and give it to my Dad for Christmas!

Armed with Photoshop CS3, my Wacom Graphire tablet , and a lot of coffee, I set to work. Here is what I did:

1. After opening the photo in Photoshop I made converted to LAB. I like to work in LAB when an image has a lot of noise/dust and/or color casts. The noise is usually isolated to the L channel and color issues are in one or both of the A and B channels.
2. I made a new layer from the original photo used Photoshop’s Despeckle Filter to remove the dust from the L channel on this layer. This removed a lot of the dust and some of the film grain but not all of it.
3. Then I made sure all LAB channels were selected and then loosely selected the trees in the upper right with the lasso tool and added a new Hue/Saturation correction layer on top of everything. I selected the blue channel and desaturated it. This completely removed blue fringe around the tree branches (chromatic aberration). The photo started to look a lot better already.
4. I then created another selection around the domed building and the light grey building below it using a combination of the lasso and polygon lasso tools. Then I created another Hue/Saturation correction layer and selected the cyan channel. Desaturating this channel really made the building pop.
5. Next came the most difficult and time consuming part – using the lasso tool, I carefully selected my brother, Dad and me on the despeckled copy layer. Once the rough selection was made, I switched to mask mode and used the Brush tool to refine the selection. I’m not going to go in to detail on how to make a complex selection tight now because it would take a lot of writing! Once you make a selection like this it is a good idea to save it (Select->Save Selection…).
6. Once we were selected, I made a copy (command C) and then created a new layer and pasted us over the top of the Despeckled layer (but below the Hue/Saturation correction layers. On this layer, I selected the Multiply blend mode and adjusted the opacity until we popped out a little – somewhere around 20% looked good. This is a great technique to use to restore blown out areas if there is any detail left, or as I did here, to saturate the colors (especially the skin tones) without looking unnatural.
7. Now I masked the paving and created a Hue/Saturation correction layer to remove the color cast. I saved this selection also. After creating a new copy of the Despekle layer, I loaded this selection in to it’s mask. I then added a layer  style and choose Color Overlay. After picking a brick red color from the photo, I adjusted the transparency until the paving looked natural with a slight brick red color.
8. Now I turned my attention to the smoothing the color noise and film grain. I experimented with Noise Ninja and several Filters but didn’t really like the results. So, I created a duplicate copy of the file (saving the original with all of the layer work) and flattened it. I then selected just the L (lightness) channel and used the Blur tool to start to smooth the noise. This step took the longest time because I basically “painted” over the entire photo using a variety of Blur tool diameters and Strengths (usually I use 40%). This technique allowed me to smooth the blotchiness in the black building and windows on the left side of the photo, smooth the speckling in our clothes, etc. I used this tool very carefully on our faces with a small diameter and a low Strength. It took several hours to complete this step.
9. Now I decided to gently rebuild the missing arial on the domed building and the blown out wall on the right side. I used Photoshops Brush tool and a very light shade of grey (that I picked p from the photo) to very faintly add these elements.
10. With all of this work complete, I made another copy and converted it back to RGB and saved it as a JPG. I opened this JPG in Adobe Lightroom 2 to do one last enhancement - Vibrance adjustment. The Vibrance tool is not available in Photoshop CS3 (it is in CS4) and basically it saturates non-skin tones.
11. Back in Photoshop, I finish up with sharpening using the Unsharp Mask Filter. 

Here is the result:

(click to to see the full size image)

So, now I just need to print, matte and frame it!

To that, I have an answer: look at the Mockups generated XML file! Here is an example for a Button:

<control controlID="23" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::Button"
x="139" y="393" w="82" h="-1" zOrder="6" locked="false" isInGroup="-1">
  <controlProperties>
    <text>Push%20Me</text>
  </controlProperties>
</control> 

It will have the x, y coordinates for the top left corner of each item on the Mockup. For many, it will have the width (w) and height (h) too, however, if w=”-1″ or h=”-1″ it means Mockups is automatically determining the control’s width and height. In this case, you will just have to take a quick guess, try it, and refine until you get it right. Use the x, y, w, and h values as the starting point in your hotspot CSS markup. Test the demo page to make sure the hotspots are where you want them and tweak them if they are not.

Once you become familiar with the process and use my templates on the original post, it should only take a minute (or less) to layout a new Mockup demo screen!

The Details

 selection.css now includes a new class to set the display of items of that class to “none“:

.hidden_image {
    display:none;
}

Now, in your first HTML file (usually index.html), you simply need to list the images you want to pre-load and set their class to hidden_image. It is important that you do this at the very bottom of the HTML file so the browser can start to lay out the rest of your demo while it is loading the images. I added them immediately before the </body> tag:

<img src="images/01.png" class="hidden_image">
<img src="images/02.png" class="hidden_image">
<img src="images/03.png" class="hidden_image">
<img src="images/04.png" class="hidden_image">
<img src="images/05.png" class="hidden_image">
</body>

Now, when you open your index.html, the browser will preload all of the images you specified and the demo will be much more interactive! If you have a lot of images or very large images to pre-load, you might consider not loading them all up front. Instead, load only the images needed for the hotspot targets. Then on the target HTML, use the same technique to pre-load it’s hotspot target images – cascading the pre-loading.

And 1 last thing: you can run these demos both from the desktop or from a Web server!

Several weeks ago I blogged about balsamiq Mockups. Now that I’ve really had a chance to use Mockups I am even more impressed with it! I won’t be using paper and pencil for thinking through UI designs any more!

Over the last few weeks I’ve put together a number of mockups and thought it would be really cool if I could link them together based on a user’s click on a hotspot on the image – like HTML image maps. A number of people have asked balsamiq for a demo or storyboard feature – and that would be really cool – but until that day comes, here is my low-budget, but pretty nifty, way to build demos from Mockups or any screen image or capture for that matter.

Here is a little demo that you can try out. There are 2 hotspots on the first page – over the Login button and over the first item in the “Today’s BIG Shrughs” list. Mouse over them and you should see a transparent orange rectangle with a dotted border appear. When you click the Login button, the next mockup screen will be displayed. It has several hotspots too. Explore a little bit before reading the next section.

How its Done

1. Create a folder for your demo. Download and copy the index.html.txt and selection.css files in to your folder. Remove the ‘.txt‘ from index.html.txt – it is just there so you can download the file as text and not as a Web page! Create a folder called images too.
2. Create your Mockup screens and save each as a PNG file. I like to put them in the folder called images (of all places!).
3. Open index.html in your favorite text editor (I use TextMate on the Mac) and change the text between the <title> and </title> tags to your demo’s name.
4. In the #image-map CSS, change the background-image: filename to point to your 1st Mockup PNG file. I like to name my PNGs with simple names like 01.png, 02.png, etc. Also change the height: and width: tags to your image’s dimensions.
5. You will notice that there are 2 hotspots defined in the index.html file you downloaded. If you save index.html and then open it in a browser, you will see these hotspots highlight as you mouse around over your Mockups image. All you have to do now is determine how many hotspots the screen should have on it and create an anchor for each in the <body><div id=”hotspot”> section. Here is an example: <a href=“02.html” id=“signin”></a>. The href points to the destination html file that will include the Mockups PNG file for the next screen. Once you have finished, you need to add a hotspot markup in the CSS style section. Here is an example from the sample:

#hotspot a#signin {

top: 106px;

left: 438px;

width: 333px;

height: 27px;

}

You will need to change the top:, left:, width: and height: to fit the hotspot on your Mockup. Make sure it has the same name as the id tag in the anchor section you created. Create as many of these hotspot anchor sections as you need.

That’s all there is to it! It is a little manual but it goes quickly one you get the hang of it. Take a look at the demo again so you can see how it works. One last thing, you can change the appearance of the highlight hotspot rectangle in the selection.css. The border color can be changed, its width changed, and its style changed to solid, dashed, or dotted. You can also have a fill color (background-color:) and make it transparent with the opacity:. My example demonstrates this. Notice that IE needs a special markup for opacity.

One last thing! You can also add text to the HTML page to tell your users/testers what they are seeing, give a Use Case or anything else you want.

After removing the opponent player and changing the background signs, I ran my Photoshop Action. It takes about 2 seconds and here is what comes out:

How it’s Done

Basically, start with your photo and make a copy of it – work on the copy. Now, use Photoshop’s Clone Stamp, Healing Brush or other drawing tools to clean up the image (remove extra players, remove background items, etc). Once you have the image the way you want it, follow these 3 steps to turn it in to a cartoon:

1. Apply the Filter->Artistic->Poster Edges filter. I use Edge Thickness = 7, Edge Intensity = 1, and Posterization = 3.
2. Now, bump the contrast and brightness using Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast to get a pleasing effect. I use 12 on the brightness and 30 on contrast.
3. Finally, apply Filter->Artistic->Cutout and set Numberof Levels = 6, Edge Simplicity = 4, and Edge Fidelity = 2.

Since 1986 I have purchased and used almost every major photo processing and cataloging product for the Macintosh – in fact, I even started a company in 2002 (Pixingo) to build a post-production workflow application (PhotoFirst) targeted at professional photographers. That’s the PhotoFirst application icon that I designed and here is a screenshot of the Compare Task pane:

(click for full size image)

Hopefully, you can learn from my experience and save some money (and aggravation) to boot!

Part C – Post-production Techniques

When I return from shooting, my objective is to get the best photographs processed and published on my photo Web site quickly – but with high quality. A 16GB Compact Flash card containing 1200 RAW (11-13MB) images from one or more soccer games presents a serious challenge! If I spent 10 seconds on each photo, it would take 3 hrs. 20 mins. to process each day’s photos – and that is if I only spent 10 seconds per photo! Most photographers spend much more time than that. Consider what steps must be performed on each “keeper” photo (not in any specific order):

• color manage
• straighten to remove tilt
• crop
• correct exposure
• correct white balance
• spot corrections
• correct contrast
• remove noise
• tag
• resize & format

One approach to weed out the culls is to quickly review each photo and either flag the bad photos or the “good” photos. Then, you perform the production steps on the good photos in a second pass. This approach works well – especially if you use different software for organizing/cataloging and photo corrections. For instance, if you use Microsoft’s Expression or Apple’s iPhoto to organize your photos and Adobe Photoshop to perform straightening, cropping, tonal and color corrections, etc. I used Expression Media (actually it was called iView Multimedia before Microsoft acquired the company) and Photoshop for many years in this way.

An alternative approach, and the one that I use now that tools like Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture are available, is to take one pass through the photos and complete all the operations on each photo as I go. For most of my soccer shoots, I can process the entire set of images using only Adobe Lightroom. Days with difficult lighting (like the rain storm I shot in last Saturday) may require some additional image processing in Photoshop or Noise Ninja.

Before I get in to the details on organizing your photos, I do want to say a few words about back-ups. Digital photos are precious – if your disk crashes or you “accidently” delete them, they can be lost forever. Big RAW photos consume lots of disk storage so many photographers have a tendency not to back them up. If your photos are important to you, then back them up. You don’t have to go the the lengths I do, a simple extra hard disk or occasional backups to high quality DVDs should suffice. Now let me describe how I organize my soccer photos, since organization seems to cause a lot of consternation.

I use 2 external 1TB (each) hard disks that I keep duplicate copies of my photos on. One of these disks is my master library (the one that has the Lightroom catalog on it) and the other is my backup library. The master library is also automatically backed up to my Apple TimeCapsule. That gives me a total of 3 copies of each photo on 3 different disks. If a disk starts to go bad (which seems to happen every 4 or 5 years), I purchase 2 of the “latest and greatest” disks and copy the master and backup catalogs to these new disks. I’ve done that a few times over the years.

On my master disk I have a folder named Lightroom and below that are folders for my photo collection (like Landscapes, Family, Cars, etc). Since I am discussing soccer photographs in this post, I’ll focus on that. Under Lightroom is a Soccer folder and below that are folders organized by year (I call the “year” folder) – for instance 2006, 2007 and 2008. I like a chronological organization for soccer games since it makes it easy to find a game when a parent asks, “Do you still have that photo of Billy from the Sachems game last October?”

When I return from a game, I create a new folder under the year folder and name it for the current day (I call the “day” folder) like this: 2008-09-12. So, for example, my disk(s) would be organized like this for today’s (September 12th, 2008) photos:

Lightroom/Soccer/2008/2008-09-12

Inside the day folder, I create a folder for each game I shot (I call the “game” folder). These I name after the teams that played – so something like Stars U12 vs Bolts. I have 2 boys on Stars (U12 and U14) so I organize by my sons’ team names first. For example, if I shot 2 games today – one for each son – I would create 2 game folders. Once these folders are created on the master disk, I insert my Compact Flash card in to the card reader and copy the photos to the appropriate game folders. In practice, I use Mac OSX Automator scripts to create the folders and copy the files to the master disk. I do not delete the photos from the CF card yet, I like to do that after I have all the photos processed, the processed photos copied to my backup hard disk, and the finals uploaded to my Web site. 

Now that my photos are organized on my master hard disk, I launch Lightroom and import the photos using Lightroom’s Synchronize Folders… function on the current year folder. Here’s what I mean:

(click for full size image)

This adds the photos to Lightroom’s catalog and the new day and game folders show up in the list. With the photos now organized, I am ready to start the workflow! What I am about to describe may seem a little odd but there is a method to my madness. It is what works for me.

To get started, I select one of the game folders that has photos to process and select Lightroom’s Develop tool. I zoom the window to occupy the full screen, make sure my workspace lighting is satisfactory, get a drink, and start to process.

As I look at each photo I make a determination if it is an obvious cull for one of these reasons:

• out of focus
• nothing in frame (usually a foot shot!)
• ball not visible anywhere in frame
• really bad composition – none of my team’s players,  jumbled group of players, PortaPotty in background, etc

I set the photo’s color label to “Red” (just press the 6 key). This is how I safely mark cull photos for later deleting. I don’t like to delete as I go – that’s a dangerous practice and is disrupts my rhythm waiting for the deletion to finish. I used to use Lightroom’s “Rejected” feature (X key) but I like the color coding scheme I use now better.

Many times I’ll have a sequence of photos of a player dribbling the ball, passing, etc. I usually only post one of these to my Web site but I like to keep the others if they are good shots. I mark those with the “Blue” color label (9 key). If the photo is a keeper, I set its flag to “Flagged” (P key).

So, to recap, for each photo I look at I either set its color to “Red” or “Blue” or flag to “Flagged”. Occasionally I might have to scroll forward a few photos to see a series of a play developing in order to choose the best to flag. The others usually get set to “Blue” unless they have an obvious defect and are set to “Red”. I’ll explain how I use these color tagged photos later.

Once I have a “Flagged” photo, I start my post-production sequence. The first thing I do is use the Crop & Straighten tool (red arrow).

I like to make sure my horizons are level and any goal posts, fence posts, buildings, flag poles, etc are actually plumb! Its a small step but it is amazing how many amateur photographers neglect this step. Once the photo is straightened, I crop. Cropping is an artistic decision. I personally like tight crops for my players. But I do mix it up with some wide group crops if the composition is interesting. Here are examples of each.

Since I almost always shoot in Manual mode (see Part B of this series), once I have corrected the first photo from the game, I can Copy and re-apply those settings to most of the others. To make tonal and color corrections, I use Lightroom’s Basic panel:

Usually, I only need to use this tool to enhance the photo. I generally start with Exposure and then set the White Balance using the Eye Dropper tool on a neutral part of the image like a white goalpost, jersey or lettering, or white ball in the frame. Occasionally, I will tweak the Temp and Tint to get a more pleasing white balance. Sometimes a slight tweak to Fill Light can bring out an underexposed face.

With the basic exposure and white balance set, I move on to Brightness and Contrast. Most of the time, these are just left at their defaults but sometimes can help make a photo pop. I use the Lightroom Preset named General-Punch which bumps the Clarity and Vibrance a bit. I really like using Lightroom’s Vibrance tool instead of Saturation – saturation affects all of the tones in your photo whereas vibrance only affects the primary colors but not the player’s face and skin. Try an experiment and you’ll see what I mean.

Finally, I apply the Sharpen-Portraits Preset. Rarely, I’ll tweak the sharpening on the Detail panel.

Probably 80% of my photos can be processed as just described. Once I’ve completed the first photo, I do a Shift-Command-C (copy) to copy the settings to apply to successive photos. I make sure to uncheck the Chromatic Aberration, Split Toning, Local Adjustments, Calibration, Spot Removal, and Crop checkboxes. 

(click for full size image)

Once the first photo is completed, the rest usually go very quickly. The workflow looks like the following – the amount of time each step takes is in ‘( )’:

1. (1 second) Determine what to do with the photo – set its color label to “Red” or “Blue” or flag to “Flagged”
2. (4 seconds) Use the Crop & Straighten tool
3. (1 second) Paste the Settings (Shift-Command-V)
4. (0 to 10 seconds) Make any minor enhancements unique to this photo

Most of the time I only spend 1 second per photo. That cuts that 3 hr. 20 min. down to 20 minutes! Of course, I spend a few extra seconds on the keepers (anywhere from 5 additional seconds to 15 or more), but that will be on a select few of the 1200 original photos.

Sometimes, things are not quite so easy because of tough lighting conditions, etc. In those cases, more work on individual photos might be necessary. The Tone Curve and Color panels are great tools to use in these cases. On really poor lighting days where I’ve had to bump the ISO from 800 up to 1600, I’ll use Noise Ninja to cleanup the noise immediately after straightening and cropping but before other corrections.

After I’ve taken the pass through all of the photos, I am ready for clean up and publishing. First I review all of the “Red” labeled photos by choosing the “Red” filter button. If I have a good set of keepers, I’ll usually just select all of these “Red” photos and delete them from the disk. Gone, forever. But they were the dregs of the shoot. Remember, I have all of those “Blue” labeled photos that weren’t quite suitable for publishing but worth hanging on to. If I am really satisfied with the keepers, I’ll go through the “Blue” images and delete some of the extras just to cut down on disk storage space.

Now I set the “Flagged” filter to view only the keeper photos. I select all of them and choose the File->Export… menu item. I use the Zenfolio photo site and use Jeffrey Friedl’s excellent Lightroom Zenfolio Export plug-in that automatically publishes my photos to the site. Make sure to set the color profile to sRGB for photos you are publishing to the Web. The plug-in can also save a set of photos to the local disk. I use this option to keep a set of final, enhanced photos on my local disk. I organize these in a folder named Zenfolio exactly like I organize the photos in the Lightroom folder. This folder is also backed up to my TimeCapsule – giving me 2 additional “backups” (one on Zenfolio, one on the TimeCapsule). Finally, I copy the entire day folder tree from the master disk to the backup disk and then and only then do I delete the photos on my Compact Flash card!

I hope this gives you a sense of my workflow. Like I said earlier, don’t accept this as the only way to handle your photos. But I think the general process is worth considering: 1) cull down to the best photos as quickly as possible, 2) straighten and crop the best ones, 3) enhance the best ones and try to reuse your adjustments, 4) BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS!