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--- post_production_editing [2020/09/07 21:27] – hubz
+++ post_production_editing [2020/09/18 03:59] (current) – sadikyo
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-===== Post Production/Editing =====
+====== Post Production/Editing ======
 If you've already scanned using the guidelines and tutorials and have successfully preserved a RAW scan then you've already done a great service to the preservation community! However if you want to clean up and improve your images and release them in a non-RAW format we can give you a few tips here. This is by no means a perfect method, there are honestly no perfect methods with post production/editing of images because it will always need to be specifically tailored to whatever the desired image is intended for. But we can give some general advice here at the very least!
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+You'll need to drop down your Set to the proper set and action to the proper action you want to run. Once you do this it will remember the last one you have selected. Next you'll want to choose a source, I'll commonly choose Open Files or Folder depending on my uses. For this action we'll probably just have all our RAW TIFF scans sitting in a folder so set it for Foulder and click Choose and browse to it. Next I recommend setting Destination as Save and Close, and lastly at the bottom change Errors to "Log Errors to File" and Save As make it somewhere on your computer. Otherwise anytime something goes wrong your actions will freeze up with errors as they go. With this if you run into issues it will wait until it's tried to process all actions on all files before notifying you there was a problem. This is useful when you're doing something like running Sattva Descreen against a large amount of images and it fails to detect it properly (which is quite often).
+After this just click OK and you should see your actions begin to run against your images. Come back after they're all done and see if they applied correctly to your images. That is how you setup a basic action, and honestly the sky is the limit with these things. I use them in all sorts of ways to automate stuff, so play around and experiment. I'll go over one more set I use quite often.
+Generally I do the same things with minor adjustments on my RAW images when I convert them to JPEGs. Again I NEVER DELETE MY RAW IMAGES, the JPEGs are just extra images I include along with RAWs as they're prettied up and their file sizes are much smaller making them easier to use.
+{{:actions11.png?direct}}
+That is my command above you can mimic if you like, or feel free to take just bits and pieces of it for ideas and adjust. For this batch of images I did two separate levels adjustments that I thought produced good results for the material I was scanning at the time. After that step as you can see I convert from my IT8 profile to SRGB as that will allow my image to display properly in programs that are unable to render IT8 Profiles (Which is a lot of them including web browsers). Next up I am running Sattva Descreen against them with Automatic settings. However as I noted this sometimes produces improper results if Sattva detects the screen incorrectly. So let's tell it what screen to try and detect. Just so you know you can click any adjustable action in your action set to adjust it manually and it will remember the settings you pick. This can be used in all sorts of ways naturally but for this case I'm going to double click the Descreen action step to adjust it.
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+I had Automatic checked previously so I've unchecked it, I then clicked the box to the right of "Screen, Lines/inch" along the top to have it detect the screen. It found one it it thinks it's 177 which looks good to me. BUT with Sattva I have to manually adjust it for it to record that it isn't an automatic settings. So I move the slider off 177 and then back on it. After that I'll hit OK and my image will begin to descreen and record my action with this new value. We can see if it worked by looking at our action now.
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+Instead of automatic it now knows I want to only descreen my images I run this action against at 177. If it is unable to find a screen at that it will leave the image open stop at this step, and move on to the next image in the batch. This is why I mentioned earlier it's a good idea to either have a machine with a lot of RAM or do smaller batches of images as when the Sattva step fails and it often can it will leave images open gobbling up resources. However it's a good thing as it lets us go in after the batch is over and try to manually set the screen properly or just skip the step entirely.
+Let's segue into that for a second.To skip a step on any action set you simply click the checkbox on the left side of the action and it will skip it if it's unchecked. You'll notice too that after doing this your Action's name will have a red checkmark next to it which signifies that you are skipping a step in this action. Just a nice visual reference in case you forget. If you click an action step when an image is open it will highlight and if you press the play button along the bottom bar it will start at that action step and continue on down, which is another useful thing to know.
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+Alright so our next step in that action set is to shrink the image size down to 600DPI. The one after that is an Unsharp Mask setting i do that sharpens the image up very slightly which can help with blurriness caused by resizing, it's a very faint adjustment as I don't want to get crazy with it especially when I'm running it against a batch of images that may be quite different from each other.
+Lastly I save my image as a JPEG and then close it. Again this action set saves me an incredible amount of time and the fact that I can adjust it on the fly for my uses and that it ALWAYS does the actions I tell it to allows me to cut down on human error in case I forget to resize my image, or convert it to SRGB etc.
+Action Sets are VERY powerful and I highly recommend experimenting and using them if you're going to do a lot of post production/editing. It just makes your life so much easier imo.