Camera nerds: I have updated/tested the Photoshop script that I use to convert camera RAW files to multiple sizes of JPEG (adding EXIF and visible copyright information in the process) for Web publication. These are now tested with Adobe Photoshop CS5, which itself seems to be a very stable product on my 4-year-old Dell Windows XP machine.
All of the necessary scripts are free and open-source; download from http://photo.net/learn/photoshop/
Do you not use a photo-workflow app like Lightroom? (Being on Windows, I expect you don’t use Aperture).
Photoshop for a photographer is like a chisel and rock for a writer. Sure, you’ll be able to make gorgeous letters, but being limited to about a letter a day is less appealing. Using a typewriter will get you equally pretty letters, and as a bonus you’ll actually be able to produce complete words, sentences, and even paragraphs(!)
Hearing of photographers using a Photoshop-only workflow sounds almost as painful as a film/scan workflow, but without the nostalgia of the darkroom.
Jeffrey: I do not use Lightroom because, last I checked, it doesn’t do what I want, i.e., add black borders, generate JPEGs in multiple sizes, and put my copyright info at the bottom right. As far as Photoshop being inefficient, I use Adobe Bridge to select and rename RAW files. Then I spend about five seconds starting up my script in Photoshop and walk away from the computer until it finishes.
You can set up Lightroom to do all that, but if that’s all you do in post processing, there’s little benefit to moving your workflow to Lightroom.
(Not needing to look through your photos after a shoot to weed out bad shots, make minor adjustments in exposure and composition, etc., puts you at a much higher level of skill than me. For those things, Lightroom is infinity better than bridge or Explorer, but that matters only if you do that stuff, which I do.)
Jeffrey: Tell us how to do this with Lightroom and please post an example! The system needs to be fully automated, needs to add the black borders so that the visible copyright text is not interfering with the photo, and needs to place the text appropriately on both vertical and horizontal images. It should also add a bit of Unsharp Mask. I tried doing this with Photoshop Actions (the command recorder) and ran into some limitations.
I suspect most of the tools don’t do exactly this is because this is a quirky way you like to do it, but not many others!
That said: I do find it a real shame that for the non-nerds (or nerds who don’t want to spend the time) the only real options are a hosted service such as Flickr or a heavy-weight, over-engineered heap of PHP code like “Gallery” that creates a truly horrible way of viewing photos on a website. The only alternative are the “web export” functions in Aperture/Lightroom/Picassa/iPhoto.
My ideal solution would be an export plugin for Aperture that uploads to my own website where some lightweight scripts turn it into a coherent, navigable site, without all the crud that comes with Gallery or Flickr…