An ImageIngester (
http://basepath.com/ImageIngester) user recently directed me to the D-65 site (
http://www.d-65.com), which is mostly for publicizing digital photography workflow workshops give by Jamie Spritzer and Seth Resnick. They also sell some PDFs that describe their workflow and other related topics. I bought a copy of their 55-page "Digital Workflow, Not Workslow...with CS2" for $24.95, since it seemed to be the newest and most comprehensive of the PDFs for sale.
The PDF isn't even close to The DAM Book in scope, detail, and readability. (The writing is somewhat clunky... I'll take Peter over them any day.) The price-per-page isn't competitive, either: The DAM Book is 280 pages for $34.95, and, unlike the PDF, you can carry around and read it without a laptop, or even batteries. (The DAM Book would be a great deal even at $54.95, but please don't tell Peter.)
The D-65 workflow seems to me to include some questionable advice: (1) a microdrive is more reliable than a flash card (I'm a computer guy, and I just can believe that), and (2) you should rename your DCIM directory
while it's on the card and then copy the renamed folder to your hard disk with the Finder (or the Windows equivalent, although I'm not sure I saw Windows mentioned anywhere). The idea of modifying the card before ingestion and initial backup scares me.
With D-65, you don't use any ingestion software. However, ImageIngester would help, as it avoids the problem that causes D-65 to want to rename the DCIM (to avoid overwriting a folder on the hard drive), it makes backups automatically, it can automatically provide bulk metadata, and it can rename the files, although it can't put them into folders the D-65 way. (Not yet, anyway... I'm still thinking about how to do this.) Also, you can ask ImageIngester to use DNG Converter to verify your raws, even if you don't also want to convert them to DNGs.
All that aside, the fundamental difference between the D-65 and DAM workflows is that D-65 relies on the folder structure to find things, whereas the DAM workflow calls for a cataloging program (iView is featured in the book). One could think of this as physical organization vs. virtual organization. With D-65, you would put files for a job in a job folder, with subfolders named, for example, 20050401_clientx_raw, 20050401_clientx_psd, 20050401_clientx_jpg, 20050401_clientx_webgallery, and 20050401_clientx_dng.
Within those folders, D-65 suggests putting more description in the file names themselves, such as date, client name, version, whether black and white, and so on. With a cataloging program, one would care much less about the name itself, since client, version, black and white and other properties could be handled with keywords or catalog sets.
DAM and D-65 are similar in that they emphasize a raw workflow, using Bridge right after ingestion, and then converting the initial Camera Raw results to DNG. I'm sure some details are different, but I didn't read that part of the D-65 document that carefully, as my own (decidedly low-volume) workflow is different (
http://basepath.com/ImageIngester/simplified.php).
If you don't want to use a cataloging program, relying instead on a physical organization and Bridge to find things, the D-65 workflow may be OK, although I'm not sure you need their PDF to figure out what to do, as all the important principles are in The DAM Book, and I just revealed the naming scheme. (I know nothing about their workshops.)
I bought the D-65 PDF to learn about their folder and naming scheme, since I've had so many requests to make that part of ImageIngester more flexible. (Silly me, I thought everyone would just do it Peter's way, and then I'd be set.) I'm not even close to figuring out how to give everyone what they want, or even if I want to try, but I'm working on it.
--Marc
Author
