Is It CD-R Problem or Bad Work Flow

[Charles Wesley]

Here's an image I made in July 2003. It was taken with a Canon 10D, EF 100- 400 mm f/4.5- 5.6 IS lens, Canon 1.4 TC, Canon 550 EX flash and a tripod. I did not save as a RAW image. My CD-R is a Fujifilm 700 mb. Can't find the metadata but it's most likely shot at 400 ISO and a D.O.F. of 5.6- 8.0 as I remember.

Upon opening the image in PS/ CS4, I can see artifacts around the outer blooms. Where the pink meets the green. It really ticks me off. I tried some techniques to improve the image and it still looks like trash IMO. I'm seeing issues with other CD-R's and my Kodak PhotoCD's from 1992- 1993.

Let me know what you think...
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Charlie Wesley
St. Augustine Beach, FL

[Roger Clark]

Charlie,
Are the images jpeg or uncompressed (e.g. tiff)? It looks to me like processing artifacts, but could be contributions from jpeg compression if jpeg (hard to tell without a full resolution crop).

It is pretty unlikely it would be the CD-R itself. The CD-R will not change the data so this must be processing issues, whether work flow, or jpeg compression. The effects may be different now if you are viewing on an LCD versus a CRT years ago, and/or your standards have changed.

You can fix processing artifacts by cloning them out, but it is a lot of work.

Roger

[arash_hazeghi]

Roger is right, if data on CDR is corrupted in any way your PC will not be able to read the file let alone display the photo. In some highly unlikely cases a viewer might be able to display a partially corrupted file but then you will see something like a half black photo- not artifacts like what you describe.

[Charles Wesley]

Roger & Arash ,

Thanks so much for your comments. Now I know it's not the CD-R's. Roger this was a .tiff on my CD-R that I converted to a web .jpg. Somehow I must have compressed the .jpg in the process.

Guys, do you save files as RAW or .psd's for archiving on ext. hard drives, CD's or DVD's?
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Charlie Wesley
St. Augustine Beach, FL

[Roger Clark]

Here is my current work flow:

I carry a 500 GB USB portable hard drive with me. When I offload cards, I offload them to the portable hard drive. This is my first archived backup. When this drive gets full, I'll buy a new one and put the full one
on a shelf. I copy the data from the hard drive to my main workstation. There I go through the images, deleting those I don't want to keep. The remainder stay on the workstation hard drive and get backed up with my normal backup procedures. I currently rotate 3 sets of hard drives (two 1.5 tarabyte drives per set). The latest set goes off site, and the oldest set comes home. That home set becomes the next backup when it is time.

That gives me 5 backups: 1) the usb portable hard drive, 2) the main workstation, 3) the backup set, 4 and 5) more backup sets as backups rotate. But wait, there is more. I also have a linux box running Samba and those drives are mounted on my PC workstation. When I feel the need for a backup, I pop a copy over to the linux box (old retired PCs make great disk servers running linux and they will appear much faster than they did under windows, and ubuntu linux is free with free updates).

But wait, there's more. The original CF cards: I currently have about 120 GBytes in cards. I reformat a few cards at a time, keeping the images on the most recent cards as yet another copy. Cards only get reformatted as I need them (basically the evening before a shoot, I'll format more than I anticipate on using). When I'm on a trip, I take more than one usb hard drive, so I have at least 2 copies of all images, plus those remaining on CF cards. (Note 1 terabyte USB portable hard drives are out now, so the next set of portables I buy will be higher capacity.)

One can never have too many backups.

As to what is backed up: the original raws, jpeg conversions (I often shoot raw plus jpeg so I don't have to convert later; unless rapid action, then just raw). Processed images are 16-bit tiffs. Sometimes I keep intermediate photoshop files, but once printed and/or I confirm the final image is good, I'll delete intermediate files.

Hope this helps.

My digital work flow:
http://www.clarkvision.com/photoinfo/digitalworkflow

Roger

[Charles Wesley]

Rodger,

Thanks so much I see what you're doing. I know what to do now. You were extremely helpful and it's most appreciated...
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Charlie Wesley
St. Augustine Beach, FL