I've been enjoying shooting and processing some HDR recently and have been trying to come up with a good way to organize it all within Aperture. My current strategy is to put a shoot into a project. This will contain photos that are HDR sources and “regular” shots. then I keyword tag the HDR sources as “HDR Source” and create a smart album based on them (after weeding out the keepers). And then as I process the sources I tag the final image with “HDR” and create a Smart Album of them. I place those 2 Smart Albums inside a folder. So then my project has Smart Albums for favorites (3+ stars), blog photos (keyword), a folder for HDR stuff which has 2 Smart Albums of HDR Source and HDRs (keyword driven). Is anyone doing it a different/better way?
I started converting source images to JPEG after hearing a talk with Trey Ratcliff. He pointed out that if you’ve covered the entire dynamic range with your exposures, there’s no need for the extra bit-depth. The information you lose exists in the other exposures. I don’t convert all source images to JPEG though. Sometimes I like to experiment with exposure and white balance before re-processing.
Sounds like a good way to do it. I’ve reserved the 1-star rating solely for source images (both HDR and panos). After processing I usually convert HDR source images from RAW to JPEG to save space (using the AppleScript available in the store). I’ll try your workflow next time I shoot HDR.
I actually use the same methord for panos. Do you ever think you’ll need or want to reprocess those source images? I’m such a digital packrat the idea of converting a source image to a JPEG worries me; what if I want to reprocess a shot in the future with new techniques? Though I shoot in DNG so my files aren’t quite as big as true RAW files. Let me know how my system works for you.