Proof Delay- w00t!
So some of you are not yet using Proof Delay for your event or large volume shooting work. Let’s dig deeper into it, mkay? Today, I shot a Tae Kwon Do event. My preparation began yesterday, when I created the gallery for today’s event. Why? Simple, I needed the URL so I could put it on the flyers that I gave to all the parents. Make it easy and simple, and they will buy. OK, at the event, I set my camera to shoot RAW, plus a small jpg – yet the jpg is large enough to handle the biggest size I want to sell. But on my Canon 5D, this still resulted in JPGs of over 1mb, which makes for longer uploading times. So, I quickly made an action in Photoshop, to save the jpgs at compression level 7 (yes, 7…. remember, upon order, I’ll be replacing these with jpg 10 new files!), and I soon had file sizes of about 350-400Kb. Of course, you can also use Photoshop’s Image Processor. I’ve reached my happy medium. I have files that are large enough to support all print sizes, they look good on screen, and they’re small enough to upload fairly fast. BTW, 370 files, about 200megabytes, uploaded in 38 minutes or so. If you are doing events with lots of proofs, or have to upload many many photos at once, I highly recommend you try either (or both!) SendToSmugMug and Star Explorer. So, the first part of the workflow – make it easy for your customers to find the photos for sale, and make it easy for you to get the photos there!
OK now what? Well, the parents will now order 
And then, because I set a proof delay on this gallery, when they do order, I’ll get an email, telling me about it. And I can look in my control panel, pro sales, and see the order, and the crop that they customer picked. Whoops, look at how poorly the customer cropped…
Well, no worries! Proof and Retouch to the rescue Simply go to the crop button in your pro sales tool, and recrop the image. Of course, if you are retouching, or otherwise changing the photo, you’ll want to do that first, then “replace photo.” THEN do your crop adjustments.
There you have it. Hit the “ship it” button, and off it goes to our lab. Proof Delay is a wonderful tool. If you have any questions at all, just holler for me or any of our Support Heroes, we’ll be there for you!
December 27th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
Proof delay is an okay workaround. But it doesn’t solve the root of the problem, which is that print photos ALWAYS need to be optimized differently than photos intended for screen display. As I understand proof delay, if you had ten customers who bought ten photos each, you would have to manually upload and replace 100 photos just to fill the print orders. That’s better than sending display files to print. But still not a great solution.
Most serious photographers already have a workflow that produces separate files optimized for screen and print. Certainly if you shoot in Adobe RGB, separate print files are a necessity because A-RGB files don’t display well in a browser. Ditto if you optimize sharpening, saturation or curves for screen display, which is not uncommon.
What Smugmug really needs is a way to permanently attach a separate print file to photos displayed in galleries. When a smugmug gallery owner is logged in, the print version could show as a link under the photo as if the print version were another display size. For visitors, the print file would never be visible. But the fact that there is a print-optimized file behind the scenes would give visitors a better visual representation of what they will get before they purchase. If you really want to go wild, you could allow separate print files optimized (cropped) for different print sizes.
The need to manage separate files for display and print is one of the most vexing and time consuming parts of digital photography. Providing the ability to automatically manage display and print versions from within a single gallery would put you WAY ahead of the competition (not that you already aren’t
)
–Rob
May 31st, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I guess the large files take longer to upload…but if you just upload teh big ones…then there is no need for a “print optimized” file. I like Proof delay for the reason that I can hopefully correct bad crops prior to shipping.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
[...] SmugMug’s cropping tool and proof delay, Steve’s customers get exactly what they [...]